

\ 




4 





fi 



,, Idle Fellow 
I 

|{ JEROME KV.'^^ 
JEROME 



\W 




H. M. CALDWELL CO., PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND BOSTON ^ Jt 






To Replace lost copy 

MAR 2 8 1946 



CONTENTS. 



PAGB 

On being Hard Up 9 

On being in the Blues 20 

On Vanity and Vanities 29 

On Getting on in the World 42 

On being Idle 53 

On being in Love 65 

On the Weather 78 

On Cats and Dogs 93 

On being Shy 113 

On Babies , 127 

On Eating and Drinking 140 

On Furnished Apartments 155 

On Dress and Deportment 170 

On Memory ...... .^ •• 188 

5 



PREFACE. 



One or two friends to whom I showed 
these papers in MS., having observed that 
they were not half bad, and some of my rela- 
tions having promised to buy the book, if it 
ever came out, I feel I have no right to longer 
delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, 
public demand, I, perhaps, should not have 
ventured to offer these mere "idle thoughts" 
of mine as mental food for the English-speak- 
ing peoples of the earth. What readers ask 
nowadays in a book is that it should improve, 
instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't 
elevate a cow. I can not conscientiously re- 
commend it for any useful purpose whatever. 
All I can suggest is, that when you get tired 
of reading " the best hundred books," you 
may take this up for half an hour. It will be 
a change. 

7 



THE 



Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. 



ON BEING HARD UP. 

IT is a most remarkable thing. I sat down 
with the full intention of writing something 
clever and original ; but for the life of me I can't 
think of anything clever and original — at least 
not at this moment. The only thing I can think 
about now is being hard up. I suppose having 
my hands in my pockets has made me think 
about this. I always do sit with my hands in my 
pockets, except when I am in the company of 
my sisters, my cousins, or my aunts ; and they 
kick up such a shindy — I should say expostulate so 
eloquently upon the subject — that I have to give 
in and take them out — my hands, I mean. The 
chorus to their objections is that it is not gentle- 
manly. I am hanged if I can see why. I could 
9 



On Being .Hard Up. 

understand its not being considered gentlemanly 
to put your hands in other people's pockets (espe- 
cially by the other people), but how, oh, ye 
sticklers for what looks this and what looks that, 
can putting his hands in his own pockets make a 
man less gentle ? Perhaps you are right, though. 
Now I come to think of it, I have heard some 
people grumble most savagely when doing it. 
But they were mostly old gentlemen. We young 
fellows, as a rule, are never quite at ease unless 
we have our hands in our pockets. We are awk- 
ward and shifty. We are like what a music-hall 
Lion Comique would be without his opera-hat, 
if such a thing can be imagined. But let us put 
our hands in our trousers pockets, and let there 
be some small change in the right-hand one and 
a bunch of keys in the left, and we will face a 
female post-office clerk. 

It is a little difficult to know what to do with 
your hands, even in your pockets, when there is 
nothing else there. Years ago, when my whole 
capital would occasionally come down to *' what 
in town the people call a bob," I would recklessly 
spend a penny of it, merely for the sake of having 
the change, all in coppers, to jingle. You don't 
feel nearly so hard up with elevenpence in your 

lO 



On Being Hard Up. 

pocket as you do with a shilling. Had I been 
"La-di-da," that impecunious youth about whom 
we superior folk are so sarcastic, I would have 
changed my penny for two ha'pennies. 

I can speak with authority on the subject of 
being hard up. I have been a provincial actor. 
If further evidence be required, whiclf I do not 
think likely, I can add that I have been a ' ' gen- 
tleman connected with the press." I have lived 
on fifteen shillings a week. I have lived a week 
on ten, owing the other five; and I have lived 
for a fortnight on a great-coat. 

It is wonderful what an insight into domestic 
economy being really hard up gives one. If you 
want to find out the value of money, live on fif- 
teen shillings a week, and see how much you can 
put by for clothes and recreation. You will find 
out that it is worth while to wait for the farthing 
change, that it is worth while to walk a mile to 
save a penny, that a glass of beer is a luxury 
to be indulged in only at rare intervals, and 
that a collar can be worn for four days. 

Try it just before you get married. It will 

be excellent practice. Let your son and heir 

try it before sending him to college. He won't 

grumble at a hundred a year pocket-money 

II 



On ^eing Hard Up. 

then. There are some people to whom it would 
do a w^orld of good. There is that delicate 
blossom, who can't drink any claret under 
ninety-four^ and who would as soon think of 
dining off cats' meat as off plain roast mutton. 
You do come across these poor wretches now 
and then ; though, to the credit of humanity, 
they are principally confined to that fearful 
and wonderful society known only to lady nov- 
elists. I never hear of one of these creatures 
discussing a 7nenii card but I feel a mad desire 
to drag him off to the bar of some common 
East End public-house, and cram a sixpenny 
dinner down his throat — beef-steak pudding, 
fourpence ; potatoes, a penny ; half a pint of 
porter, a penny. The recollection of it (and the 
mingled fragrance of beer, tobacco, and roast 
pork generally leaves a vivid impression) might 
induce him to turn up his nose a little less fre- 
quently in the future at everything that is put 
before him. Then, there is that generous party, 
the cadger's delight, who is so free with his small 
change, but who never thinks of paying his 
debts. It might teach even him a little common 
sense. " I always give the waiter a shilling. 
One can't give the fellow less, you know," ex- 

12 



On Being Hard Up. 

plained a young government clerk with whom I 
was lunching the other day in Regent Street. I 
agreed with him as to the utter impossibility of 
making it elevenpence ha'penny; but, at the 
same time, I resolved to one day decoy him to 
an eating-house I ren\embered near Covent Gar- 
den, where the waiter, for the better discharge of 
his duties, goes about in his shirt-sleeves — and 
Tery dirty sleeves they are, too, when it gets near 
the end of the month. I know that waiter. If 
my friend gives him anything beyond a penny, 
the man will insist on shaking hands with him 
then and there, as a mark of his esteem ; of that 
I feel sure. 

There have been a good many funny things 
said and written about hardupishness, but the 
reality is not funny, for all that. It is not funny 
to have to haggle over pennies. It isn't funny 
to be thought mean and stingy. It isn't funny 
to be shabby, and to be ashamed of your address. 
No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty — to 
the poor. It is hell upon earth to a sensitive 
man ; and many a brave gentleman, who would 
have faced the labors of Hercules, has had his 
heart broken by its petty miseries. 

It is not actual discomforts themselves that are 
13 



On Being Hard Up. 

hard to bear. Who would mind roughing it a 
bit, if that were all it meant ? What cared Rob- 
inson Crusoe for a patch on his trousers ? Did 
he wear trousers ? I forget ; or did he go about 
as he does in the pantomimes? What did it 
matter to him if his toes did stick out of his 
boots? and what if his umbrella was a cotton 
one, so long as it kept the rain off? His shabbi- 
ness did not trouble him ; there were none of 
his friends round about to sneer at him. 

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known 
to be poor that is the sting. It is not cold that 
makes a man without a great-coat hurry along so 
quickly. It is not all shame at telling lies — 
which he knows will not be believed — that makes 
him turn so red when he informs you that he con- 
siders great coats unhealthy, and never carries an 
umbrella on principle. It is easy enough to say 
that poverty is no crime. No ; if it were, men 
wouldn't be ashamed of it. It's a blunder, 
though, and is punished as such. A poor man is 
despised the whole world over ; despised as much 
by a Christian as by a lord, as much by a dema- 
gogue as by a footman, and not all the copy- 
book maxims ever set for ink-stained youth will 
make him respected. Appearances are every- 
14 



On Being Hard Up. 

thing, so far as human opinion goes, and the 
man who will walk down Piccadilly arm in arm 
with the most notorious scamp in London, pro- 
vided he is a well-dressed one, will slink up a 
back street to say a couple of words to a seedy- 
looking gentleman. And the seedy-looking 
gentleman knows this — no one better — and will 
go a mile round to avoid meeting an acquaint- 
ance. Those that knew him in his prosperity 
need never trouble themselves to look the other 
way. He is a thousand times more anxious that 
they should not see him than they can be ', and 
as to their assistance, there is nothing he dreads 
more than the offer of it. All he wants is to be 
forgotten; and in this respect he is generally 
fortunate enough to get what he wants. 

One becomes used to being hard up, as one 
becomes used to everything else, by the help of 
that wonderful old homeopathic doctor, Time. 
You can tell at a glance the difference between 
the old hand and the novice ; between the case- 
hardened man who has been used to shift and 
struggle for years, and the poor devil of a begin- 
ner, striving to hide his misery, and in a constant 
agony of fear lest he should be found out. Noth- 
ing shows this difference more clearly than the 
15 



On Being Hard Up. 

way in which each will pawn his watch. As the 
poet says somewhere: '* True ease in pawning 
comes from art, not chance." The one goes 
into his ''Uncle's" with as much composure as 
he would into his tailor's — very likely with more. 
The assistant is even civil and attends to him at 
once, to the great indignation of the lady in the 
next box, who, however, sarcastically observes 
that she don't mind being kept waiting '* if it is 
a regular customer." Why, from the pleasant 
and business-like manner in which the transac- 
tion is carried out, it might be a large purchase 
in the three per cents. Yet what a piece of work 
a man makes of his first ^' pop." A boy popping 
his first question is confidence itself compared 
with him. He hangs about outside the shop, 
until he has succeeded in attracting the attention 
of all the loafers in the neighborhood, and has 
aroused strong suspicions in the mind of the 
policeman on the beat. At last, after a careful 
examination of the contents of the windows, 
made for the purpose of impressing the by-stand- 
ers with the notion that he is going in to pur- 
chase a diamond bracelet or some such trifle, he 
enters, trying to do so with a careless swagger, 
and giving himself really the air of a member of 
i6 



On Being Hard Up. 

the swell mob. When inside, he speaks in so 
low a voice as to be perfectly inaudible, and has 
to say it all over again. When, in the course of 
his rambling conversation about a ^'friend" of 
his, the word '' lend " is reached, he is promptly 
told to go up the court on the right, and take 
the first door round the corner. He comes out 
of the shop with a face that you could easily light 
a cigarette at, and firmly under the impression 
that the whole population of the district is watch- 
ing him. When he does get to the right place 
he has forgotten his name and address and is in a 
general condition of hopeless imbecihty. Asked 
in a severe tone how he came by ''this," he 
stammers and contradicts himself, and it is only 
a miracle if he does not confess to having stolen 
it that very day. He is therefore informed that 
they don't want anything to do with his sort, 
and that he had better get out of this as quickly 
as possible, which he does, recollecting nothing 
more until he finds himself three miles off, with- 
out the slightest knowledge how he got there. 

By the way, how awkward it is, though, having 

to depend on public-houses and churches for the 

time ! The former are generally too fast, and 

the latter too slow. Besides which your efforts 

2 17 



On Being Hard Up. 

to get a glimpse of the public-house clock from 
the outside are attended with great difficulties. 
If you gently push the swing-door ajar and peer 
in you draw upon yourself the contemptuous 
looks of the bar-maid, who at once puts you 
down in the same category with area sneaks and 
cadgers. You also create a certain amount of 
agitation among the married portion of the cus- 
tomers. You don't see the clock, because it is 
behind the door; and in trying to withdraw 
quietly you jamb your head. The only other 
method is to jump up and down outside the win- 
dow. After this latter proceeding, however, if 
you do not bring out a banjo and commence to 
sing, the youthful inhabitants of the neighbor- 
hood, who have gathered round in expectation, 
become disappointed. I should like to know, 
too, by what mysterious law of nature it is that, 
before you have left your watch ^' to be repaired ' ' 
half an hour, some one is sure to stop you in the 
street and conspicuously ask you the time. No- 
body even feels the slightest curiosity on the sub- 
ject when you've got it on. 

Dear old ladies and gentlemen, who know 
nothing about being hard up — and may they 
never, bless their gray old heads — look upon the 
iS 



On Being Hard Up. 

pawn-shop as the last stage of degradation ; but 
those who know it better (and my readers have, 
no doubt, noticed this themselves) are often sur=- 
prised, like the little boy who dreamed he went 
to heaven, at meeting so many people there that 
they never expected to see. For my part I think 
it a much more independent course than borrow- 
ing from friends, and I always try to impress this 
upon those of my acquaintance who incline to- 
ward *' wanting a couple of pounds till the day 
after to-morrow." But they won't all see it. 
One of them once remarked that he objected to 
the principle of the thing. I fancy if he had 
said it was the interest that he objected to he, 
would have been nearer the truth : twenty-five 
per cent, certainly does come heavy. 

There are degrees in being hard up. We are 
all hard up, more or less — most of us more. 
Some are hard up for a thousand pounds, some 
for a shilling. Just at this moment I am 
hard up myself for a fiver. I only want it for 
a day or two. I should be certain of paying 
it back within a week at the outside, and 
if any lady or gentleman among my readers 
would kindly lend it to me, I should be very 
much obliged indeed. They could send it to me, 
19 



On Being in the Blues. 

under cover, to Messrs. Field & Tuer, only, in 
such case, please let the envelope be carefully- 
sealed. I would give you my I O U as security. 

ON BEING IN THE BLUES. 

T CAN enjoy feeling melancholy— and there 
^ is a good deal of satisfaction about being 
thoroughly miserable — but nobody likes a fit of 
the blues. Nevertheless, everybody has them ;, 
notwithstanding which, nobody can tell why. 
There is no accounting for them. You are just 
as likely to have one on the day after you have 
come into a large fortune, as on the day after 
you have left your new silk umbrella in the train. 
Its effect upon you is somewhat similar to what 
would probably be produced by a combined 
attack of toothache, indigestion, and cold in the 
head. You become stupid, restless and irritable ; 
rude to strangers, and dangerous toward your 
friends; clumsy, maudlin, and quarrelsome; a 
nuisance to yourself and everybody about you. 

While it is on, you can do nothing and think 
of nothing, though feeling at the time bound to 
do something. You can't sit still, so put on your 
hat and go for a walk ; but before you get to the 



On Being in the Blues. 

corner of the street you wish you hadn't come 
out, and you turn back. You open a book and 
try to read, but you find Shakespeare trite and 
commonplace, Dickens is dull and prosy, Thack- 
eray a bore, and Carlyle too sentimental. You 
throw the book aside, and call the author names. 
Then you " shoo " the cat out of the room, and 
kick the door to after her. You think you will 
write your letters, but after sticking at '' Dearest 
Auntie,— I find I have five minutes to spare, and 
so hasten to write to you" for a quarter of an 
hour without being able to think of another sen- 
tence, you tumble the paper into the desk, fling 
the wet pen down upon the table-cloth, and start 
up with the resolution of going to see the Thomp- 
sons. While pulling on your gloves, however, it 
occurs to you that the Thompsons are idiots; 
that they never have supper ; and that you will 
be expected to jump the baby. You curse the 
Thompsons, and decide not to go. 

By this time you feel completely crushed. 
You bury your face in your hands, and think 
you would like to die and go to heaven. You 
picture to yourself your own sick-bed, with all 
your friends and relations standing round you 
weeping. You bless them all, especially the 

21 



On Being in the Blues. 

young and pretty ones. They will value you 
when you are gone, so you say to yourself, and 
learn too late what they have lost ; and you bit- 
terly contrast their presumed regard for you then 
with their decided want of veneration now. 

These reflections make you feel a little more 
cheerful, but only for a brief period ; for the 
next moment you think what a fool you must be 
to imagine for an instant that anybody would be 
sorry at anything that might happen to you. 
Who would care two straws (whatever precise 
amount of care two straws may represent) whether 
you were blown up or hung up, or married, or 
drowned ? Nobody cares for you. You never 
have been properly appreciated, never met with 
your due deserts in any one particular. You 
review the whole of your past life, and it is 
painfully apparent that you have been ill-used 
from your cradle. 

Half an hour's indulgence in these considera- 
tions works you up into a state of savage fury 
against everybody and everything, especially 
yourself, whom anatomical reasons alone prevent 
your kicking. Bed-time at last comes, to save 
you from doing something rash, and you spring 
upstairs, throw off your clothes, leaving them^ 

22 



On Being in the Blues. 

strewn all over the room, blow out the candle, 
and jump into bed as if you had backed yourself 
for a heavy wager to do the whole thing against 
time. There, you toss and tumble about for a 
couple of hours or so, varying the monotony by 
occasionally jerking the clothes off, and getting 
out and putting them on again. At length you 
drop into an uneasy and fitful slumber, have bad 
dreams, and wake up late the next morning. 

At least, this is all we poor single men can do 
under the circumstances. Married men bully 
their wives, grumble at the dinner, and insist on 
the children going to bed. All of which, creat- 
ing, as it does, a good deal of disturbance in the 
house, must be a great relief to the feelings of a 
man in the blues ; rows being the only form of 
amusement in Avhich he can take any interest. 

The symptoms of the infirmity are much the 
same in every case, but the affliction itself is vari- 
ously termed. The poet says that * ' a feeling of 
sadness comes o'er him." 'Arry refers to the 
heavings of his wayward heart by confiding to 
Jimee that he has ''got the blooming hump." 
Your sister doesn't know what is the matter with 
her to-night. She feels out of sorts altogether, and 
hopes nothing is going to happen. The every- 
23 



On Being in the Blues. 

day-young-man is ''so awfully glad to meet you^ 
old fellow," for he does " feel so jolly miserable 
this evening." As for myself, I generally say 
that ''I have a strange, unsettled feeling to- 
night," and ''think I'll go out." 

By the way, it never does come except in the 
evening. In the sun-time, when the world is 
bounding forward full of life, we cannot stay to 
sigh and sulk. The roar of the working day 
drowns the voices of the elfin sprites that are 
ever singing their low-toned "Miserere" in our 
ears. In the day we are angry, disappointed, or 
indignant, but never "in the blues," and never 
melancholy. When things go wrong at ten o'clock 
in the morning, we — or rather you — swear and 
knock the furniture about ; but if the misfortune 
comes at lo p.m., we read poetry, or sit in the 
dark, and think what a hollow world this is. 

But, as a rule, it is not trouble that makes us 
melancholy. The actuality is too stern a thing 
for sentiment. We linger to weep over a picture, 
but from the original we should quickly turn our 
eyes away. There is no pathos in real misery; 
no luxury in real grief. We do not toy with 
sharp swords, nor hug a gnawing fox to our 
breasts for choice. When a man or woman loves 
24 



On Being in the Blues. 



to brood over a sorrow, and takes care to keep it 
green in their memory, you may be sure it is no 
longer a pain to them. However they may have 
suffered from it at first, the recollection has be- 
come by then a pleasure. Many dear old ladies, 
who daily look at tiny shoes, lying in laven- 
der-scented drawers, and w^eep as they think of 
the tiny feet whose toddling march is done ; and 
sweet-faced young ones, who place each night 
beneath their pillow some lock that once curled 
on a boyish head that the salt waves have kissed 
to death, will call me a nasty cynical brute, and 
say I'm talking nonsense ; but I believe, neverthe- 
less, that if they will ask themselves truthfully 
whether they find it unpleasant to dwell thus on 
their sorrow, they will be compelled to answer 
*'No." Tears are as sweet as laughter to some 
natures. The proverbial Englishman, we know 
from old chronicler Froissart, takes his pleasures 
sadly, and the English woman goes a step further, 
and takes her pleasures in sadness itself. 

I am not sneering. I would not for a moment 
sneer at anything that helps to keep hearts tender 
in this hard old world. We men are cold and 
common-sensed enough for all; we would not 
have women the same. No, no, ladies dear, be 
25 



On Being in the Blues. 

always sentimental and soft-hearted, as you are — ■■ 
be the soothing butter to our coarse dry bread. 
Besides, sentiment is to woman what fun is to us. 
They do not care for our humor, surely it would 
be unfair to deny them their grief. And who 
shall say that their mode of enjoyment is not as 
sensible as ours ? Why assume that a doubled-up 
body, a contorted, purple face, and a gaping 
mouth, emitting a series of ear-splitting shrieks, 
point to a state of more intelligent happiness than 
a pensive face, reposing upon a little white hand, 
and a pair of gentle, tear-dimmed eyes, looking 
back through Time's dark avenue upon a fading 
past? 

I am glad when I see Regret walked with as a 
friend — glad because I know the saltness has been 
washed from out the tears, and that the sting must 
have been plucked from the beautiful face of Sor- 
row ere we dare press her pale lips to ours. Time 
has laid his healing hand upon the wound, when 
we can look back upon the pain we once fainted 
under, and no bitterness or despair rises in our 
hearts. The burden is no longer heavy, when we 
have for our past troubles only the same sweet 
mingling of pleasure and pity that we feel when 
old knight-hearted Colonel Newcome answers 
26 



On Being in the Blues. 

*'adsum" to the great roll-call, or when Tom 
and Maggie Tullivcr, clasping hands through the 
mists that have divided them, go down, locked 
in each other's arms, beneath the swollen waters 
of the Floss. 

Talking of poor Tom and Maggie Tulliver 
brings to my mind a saying of George Eliot's in 
connection with this subject of melancholy. She 
speaks somewhere of the "sadness of a summer's 
evening." How wonderfully true — like every- 
thing that came from that wonderful pen — the 
observation is ! Who has not felt the sorrowful 
enchantment of those lingering sunsets? The 
world belongs to Melancholy, then a thoughtful, 
deep-eyed maiden who loves not the glare of day. 
It is not till " light thickens, and the crow wings 
to the rocky wood," that she steals forth from 
her groves. Her palace is in twilight land. It 
is there she meets us. At her shadowy gate she 
takes our hand in hers, and walks beside us 
through her mystic realm. We see no form, but 
seem to hear the rustling of her wings. 

Even in the toiling, humdrum city, her spirit 

comes to us. There is a somber presence 

in each long, dull street; and the dark river 

creeps ghost-like under the black arches, as if 

27 



On Being in the Blues 

bearing some hidden secret beneath its muddy 
waves. 

In the silent country, when the trees and 
hedges loom dim and blurred against the rising 
night, and the bat's wing flutters in our face, and 
the land-rail's cry sounds drearily across the 
fields, the spell sinks deeper still into our hearts. 
We seem in that hour to be standing by some 
unseen death-bed, and in the swaying of the elms 
we hear the sigh of the dying day. 

A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is 
around us. In its light, our cares of the working 
day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese 
— ay, and even kisses — do not seem the only 
things worth striving for. Thoughts we can not 
speak, but only listen to flood in upon us, and, 
standing in the stillness under earth's darkening 
dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty 
lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, 
the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, 
but a stately temple wherein man may worship^ 
and where, at times, in the dimness, his groping 
hands touch Gqd's. 



2S 



On Vanity and Vanities. 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 

A LL is vanity, and everybody's vain. Women 
-*^ are terribly vain. So are men — more so, if 
possible. So are children, particularly children. 
One of them at this very moment is hammering 
upon my legs. She wants to know what I think 
of her new shoes. Candidly I don't think much 
of them. They lack symmetry and curve, and 
possess an indescribable appearance of lumpiness. 
(I believe, too, they've put them on the wrong 
feet.) But I don't say this. It is not criticism, 
but flattery that she wants; and I gush over them 
with what 1 feel to myself to be degrading 
effusiveness. Nothing else would satisfy this self- 
opinionated cherub. I tried the conscientious 
friend dodge with her on one occasion, but it was 
not a success. She had requested my judgment 
upon her general conduct and behavior, the exact 
case submitted being: ''Wot oo t'ink of me? 
Oo peased wi' me ?" and I had thought it a good 
opportunity to make a few salutary remarks upon 
her late moral career, and said : " No, I am not 
pleased with you." I recalled to her mind the 
29 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

events of that very morning, and I jjut it to her 
how she, as a Christian child, could expect a wise 
and good uncle to be satisfied with the carryings- 
on of an infant who that very day had roused the 
whole house at 5 a. m. ; had upset a water-jug, 
and tumbled down-stairs after it at seven ; had en- 
deavored to put the cat in the bath at eight ; and 
sat on her own father's hat at 9.35. 

What did she do ? Was she grateful to me for 
my plain speaking ? Did she ponder upon my 
words, and determine to profit by them, and to 
lead from that hour a better and nobler life? 

No ! she howled. 

That done, she became abusive. She said : 

* * Oo naughty — 00 naughty, bad unkic — 00 bad 
man— me tell MAR." 

And she did, too. 

Since then, when my views have been called 
for, I have kept my real sentiments more to myself 
like, preferring to express unbounded admiration 
of this young person's actions, irrespective of 
their actual merits. And she nods her head 
approvingly, and trots off to advertise my opinion 
to the rest of the household. She appears to 
employ it as a sort of testimonial for mercenary 
purposes, for I subsequently hear distant sounds 
30 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

of " Unkie says me dood dirl — me dot to have 
two bikkies." * 

There she goes, now, gazing rapturously at her 
own toes, and murmuring " Pittie " — two-foot- 
ten of conceit and vanity, to say nothing of other 
wickedness. 

They are all alike. I remember sitting in a 
garden one sunny afternoon in the suburbs of 
London. Suddenly I heard a shrill, treble voice 
calling from a top-story window to some unseen 
being, presumably in one of the other gardens, 
*^ Gamma, me dood boy, me wery dood boy, 
gamma; me dot on Bob's knickie-bockies." 

Why, even animals are vain. I saw a great 
Newfoundland dog, the other day, sitting in 
front of a mirror at the entrance to a shop in 
Regent's Circus, and examining himself with an 
amount of smug satisfaction that I have never 
seen equaled elsewhere, outside a vestry meeting. 

I was at a farm-house orce, when some high 
holiday was being celebrated. I don't remember 
what the occasion was, but it was something 
festive, a May-day or Quarter-day, or something 
of that sort, and they put a garland of flowers 
round the head of one of the cows. Well, that 
* Early English for biscuits, 
31 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

absurd quadruped went about all day as perky as 
a school-girl in a new frock ; and when they took 
the wreath off she became quite sulky, and they 
had to put it on again before she would stand 
still to be milked. This is not a Percy anecdote. 
It is plain, sober truth. 

As for cats, they nearly equal human beings for 
vanity. I have known a cat get up and walk out 
of the room, on a remark derogatory to her 
species being made by a visitor, while a neatly 
turned compliment will set them purring for an 
hour. 

I do like cats. They are so unconsciously 
amusing. There is such a comic dignity about 
them, such a ''How dare you!" ''Go away, 
don't touch me" sort of air. Now, there is 
nothing haughty about a dog. They are " Hail 
fellow well met" with every Tom, Dick, or Harry 
that they come across. When I meet a dog of 
my acquaintance, I slap his head, call him oppro- 
brious epithets, and roll him over on his back ; 
and there he lies, gaping at me, and doesn't mind 
it a bit. 

Fancy carrying on like that with a cat ! Why, 
she would never speak to you again as long as 
you lived. No, when you want to win the appro- 
32 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

bation of a cat you must mind what you are 
about, and work your way carefully. If you 
don't know the cat, you had best begin by say- 
ing : "Poor pussy." After which add, ''did 
'urns," in a tone of soothing sympathy. You 
don't know what you mean, any more than the 
cat does, but the sentiment seems to imply a 
proper spirit on your part, and generally touches 
ber feelings to such an extent that, if you are of 
good manners and passable appearance, she will 
stick her back up and rub her nose against you. 
Matters having reached this stage, you may ven- 
ture to chuck her under the chin, and tickle the 
side of her head, and the intelligent creature will 
then stick her claws into your legs ; and all is 
friendship and affection, as so sweetly expressed 
in the beautiful lines : 

I love little pussy, her coat is so warm, 

And if I don't tease her she'll do me no harm ; 

So I'll stroke her, and pat her, and feed her with food, 

And pussy will love me because I am good. 

The last two lines of the stanza give us a pretty 
true insight into pussy's notions of human good- 
ness. It is evident that in her opinion goodness 
consists of stroking her and patting her, and 
3 33 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

feeding her with food. I fear this narrow-minded 
view of virtue, though, is not confined to pussies. 
We are all inclined to adopt a similar standard 
of merit in our estimate of other people. A good 
man is a man who is good to us, and a bad man 
is a man who doesn't do what we want him to. 
The truth is, we each of us have an inborn con- 
viction that the whole world, with everybody 
and everything in it, was created as a sort ©f 
necessary ai)pendage to ourselves. Our fellow- 
men and women were made to admire us, and to 
minister to our various requirements. You and I, 
dear reader, are each the centre of the universe 
in our respective opinions. You, as I understand 
it, were brought into being by a considerate 
Providence in order that you might read and pay 
me for what I write ; while I, in your opinion, 
am an article sent into the world to write some- 
thing for you to read. The stars — as we term 
the myriad other worlds that are rushing down 
beside us through the eternal silence — were put 
into the heavens to make the sky look interesting 
for us at night. And the moon, with its dark 
mysteries and ever-hidden face, is an arrangement 
for us to flirt under. 

I fear we are most of us like Mrs. Poyser's 
34 • 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

bantam cock, who fancied the sun got up every 
morning to hear him crow. " 'Tis vanity that 
makes the world go round." I don't believe 
any man ever existed without vanity, and if he 
did, he would be an extremely uncomfortable per- 
son to have anything to do with. He would, 
of course, be a very good man, and we should re- 
spect him very much. He would be a very ad- 
mirable man — a man to be put under a glass case, 
and shown round as a specimen — a man to be 
stuck upon a pedestal, and copied, like ai school 
exercise — a man to be reverenced, but not a man 
to be loved, not a human brother whose hand we 
should care to grip. Angels may be very excel- 
lent sort of folk in their way, but we poor mor- 
tals, in our present state, would probably find 
them precious slow company. Even mere good 
people are rather depressing. It is in our faults 
and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch 
one another and find sympathy. We differ 
widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in 
our follies that we are at one. Some of us are 
pious, some of us are generous. Some of us are 
honest, comparatively speaking ; and some, fewer 
still, may possibly be truthful. But in vanity 
and kindred weaknesses we can all join hands. 
35 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

Vanity is one of those touches of Nature that 
make the whole world kin. From the Indian 
hunter, proud of his belt of scalps, to the Euro- 
pean general, swelling beneath his row of stars 
and medals ; from the Chinese, gleeful at the 
length of his pigtail, to the *^ professional 
beauty," suffering tortures in order that her waist 
may resemble a peg-top ; from draggle-tailed 
little Polly Stiggins, strutting through Seven 
Dials with a tattered parasol over her head, to 
the princess, sweeping through a drawing-room 
with a train of four yards long ; from 'Arry, 
winning by vulgar chaff the loud laughter of his 
pals, to the statesman, whose ears are tickled by 
the cheers that greet his high-sounding periods ; 
from the dark-skinned African, bartering his rare 
oils and ivory for a few glass-beads to hang about 
his neck, to the Christian maiden, selling her 
white body for a score of tiny stones and an 
empty title to tack before her name — all march, 
and fight, and bleed, and die beneath its tawdry 
flag. 

Ay, ay, vanity is truly the motive-power that 

moves humanity, and it is flattery that greases the 

wheels. If .you want to win affection and respect 

in this world, you must flatter people. Flatter 

36 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

high and low, and rich and poor, and silly and 
wise. You will get on famously. Praise this 
man's virtues and that man's vices. Compliment 
everybody upon everything, and especially upon 
what they haven't got. Admire guys for their 
beauty, fools for their wit, and boors for their 
breeding. Your discernment and intelligence 
will be extolled to the skies. 

Every one can be got over by flattery. The 
belted earl — ''belted earl " is the correct phrase, 
I believe. I don't know what it means, unless it 
be an earl that wears a belt instead of braces. 
Some men do. I don't like it myself. You 
have to keep the thing so tight for it to be of any 
use, and that is uncomfortable. Anyhow, what- 
ever particular kind of an earl a belted earl may 
be, he is, I assert, get-overable by flattery, just as 
every other human being is, from a duchess to a 
cat's-meat man, from a plowboy to a poet — and 
the poet far easier than the plowboy, for butter 
sinks better into wheaten bread than into oaten 
cakes. 

As for love, flattery is its very life-blood. Fill 

a person with love for himself, and what runs 

over will be your share, says a certain witty and 

truthful Frenchman, whose name I can't for the 

37 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

life of me remember. (Confound it, I never 
can remember names when I wan^ to.) Tell a 
girl she is an angel, only more angelic than an 
angel ; that she is a goddess, only more graceful, 
queenly, and heavenly than the average goddess ; 
that she is more fairy-like than Titania, more 
beautiful than Venus, more enchanting than 
Parthenope ; more adorable, lovely, and radiant, 
in short, than any other woman that ever did 
live, does live or could live, and you will make a 
very favorable impression upon her trusting little 
heart. Sweet innocent ! she will believe every 
word you say. It is so easy to deceive a woman 
— in this way. 

Dear little souls, they hate flattery, so they tell 
you; and when you say, ''Ah, darling, it isn't 
flattery in your case, it's plain, sober truth ; you 
really are, without exaggeration, the most beauti- 
ful, the most good, the most charming, the most 
divine, the most perfect human creature that ever 
trod this earth," they will smile a quiet, approv- 
ing smile, and, leaning against your manly shoul- 
der, murmur that you are a dear good fellow 

after all. 

By Jove, fancy a man trying to make love on 
strictly truthful principles, determining never to 
38 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

utter a word of mere compliment or hyperbole, 
but to scrupulously confine himself to exact fact ! 
Fancy his gazing rapturously into his mistress's 
eyes, and whispering softly to her that she wasn't, 
on the whole, bad-looking, as girls went. Fancy 
his holding up her little hand, and assuring her 
that it was of a light-drab color, shot with red ; 
and telling her, as he pressed her to his heart, 
that her nose, for a turned-up one, seemed rather 
pretty ; and that her eyes appeared to him, as 
far as he could judge, to be quite up to the 
average standard of such things ! 

A nice chance he would stand against the man 
who would tell her that her face was like a fresh 
blush rose, that her hair was a wandering sun- 
beam imprisoned by her smiles, and her eyes like 
two evening stars. 

There are various ways of flattering, and, of 
course, you must adapt your style to your subject. 
Some people like it laid on with a trowel, and this 
requires very little art. With sensible persons, 
however, it needs to be done very delicately, and 
more by suggestion than actual words. A good 
many like it wrapped up in the form of an insult, as, 
'' Oh, you are a perfect fool, you are. You would 
give your last sixpence to the first hungry-looking 
39 . 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

beggar you met; " while others will swallow it 
only when administered through the medium of 
a third person, so that if C wishes to get at an A 
of this sort, he must confide to A's particular 
friend B that he thinks A a splendid fellow, and 
beg him, B, not to mention it, especially to A. 
Be careful that B is a reliable man, though other- 
wise he won't. 

Those fine sturdy John Bulls who "hate flat- 
tery, sir," "Never let anybody get over me by 
flattery," etc., etc., are very simply managed. 
Flatter them enough upon their absence of vanity 
and you can do what you like with them. After 
all, vanity is as much a virtue as a vice. It is 
easy to recite copy-book maxims against its sin- 
fulness, but it is a passion that can move us to 
good as well as to evil. Ambition is only vanity 
ennobled. We want to win praise and admira- 
tion — or Fame, as we prefer to name it — and so 
we write great books, and paint great pictures, 
and sing sweet songs, and toil with willing hands 
in study, loom, and laboratory. 

We wish to become rich men, not in order to 

enjoy ease and comfort — all that any one man 

can taste of those may be purchased anywhere 

for two hundred pounds per annum — but that our 

40 



On Vanity and Vanities. 

houses maybe bigger and more gaudily furnished 
than our neighbors'; that our horses and servants 
may be more numerous ; that we may dress our 
wives and daughters in absurd but expensive 
clothes ; and that we may give costly dinners of 
which we ourselves individually do not eat a 
shilling's worth. And to do this, we aid the 
world's work with clear and busy brain, spread- 
ing commerce among its peoples, carrying civili- 
zation to its remotest comers. 

Do not let us abuse vanity, therefore. Rather 
let us use it. Honor itself is but the highest form 
of vanity. The instinct is not confined solely 
to Beau Brummels and Dolly Vardens. There is 
the vanity of the peacock, and the vanity of the 
eagle. Snobs are vain. But so, too, are heroes. 
Come, oh ! my young brother bucks, let us be 
vain together. Let us join hands, and help each 
other to increase our vanity. Let us be vain, not 
of our trousers and hair, but of brave hearts and 
working hands, of truth, of purity, of nobility. 
Let us be too vain to stoop to aught that is mean 
or base, too vain for petty selfishness and little- 
minded envy, too vain to say an unkind word or 
do an unkind act. Let us be vain of being sin- 
gle-hearted, upright gentlemen in the midst of a 
41 



On Getting On in the World. 



world of knaves. Let us pride ourselves upon 
thinking high thoughts, achieving great deeds, 
living good lives. 

ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 

j\TOT exactly the sort of thing for an idle fellow 
^ ^ to think about, is it? But outsiders, you 
know, often see most of the game; and sitting 
in my arbor by the way-side, smoking my hookah 
of contentment, and eating the sweet lotus leaves 
of indolence, I can look out musingly upon the 
whirling throng that rolls and tumbles past me 
on the great high-road of life. 

Never-ending is the wild procession. Day and 
night you can hear the quick tramp of the myriad 
feet — some running, some walking, some halting 
and lame; but all hastening, all eager in the 
feverish race, all straining life and limb and heart 
and soul to reach the ever-receding horizon of 
success. 

Mark them as they surge along — men and 
women, old and young, gentle and simple, fair 
and foul, rich and poor, merry and sad — all 
hurrying, bustling, scrambling. The strong push- 
ing aside the weak, the cunning creeping past 
42 



On Getting On in the World. 



the foohsh; those behind elbowing those before; 
those in front kicking, as they run, at those behind. 
Look close, and see the flitting show. Here is 
an old man panting for breath; and there a 
timid maiden, driven by a hard and sharp-faced 
aiatron ; here is a studious youth, reading ' ' How 
to get on in the World," and letting everybody 
pass him as he stumbles along with his eyes on 
his book ; here is a bored-looking man, with a 
fashionably dressed woman jogging his elbow; 
here a boy gazing wistfully back at the sunny 
village that he never again will see ; here, with a 
firm and easy step, strides a broad-shouldered 
man ; and here, with a stealthy tread, a thin-faced, 
stooping fellow dodges and shuffles upon his way ; 
here, with gaze fixed always on the ground, an 
artful rogue carefully works his way from side to 
side of the road, and thinks he is going forward ; 
and here a youth with a noble face stands, hesi- 
tating as he looks from the distant goal to tht 
mud beneath his feet. 

And now into the sight comes a fair girl, with 
her dainty face growing more wrinkled at every 
step; and now a care-worn man, and now a 
hopeful lad. 

A motley throng — a motley throng ! Prince 
43 



On Getting On in the World. 

and beggar, sinner and saint, butcher and baker 
and candlestickmaker, tinkers, and tailors, and 
plowboys and sailors — all jostling along together. 
Here the counsel in his wig and gown, and here 
the old Jew clothes-man under his dingy tiara ; 
here the soldier in scarlet, and here the under- 
taker's mute in streaming hat-band and worn 
cotton gloves ; here the musty scholar, fumbling 
his faded leaves, and *here the scented actor, 
dangling his showy seals ; here the glib politician, 
crying his legislative panaceas; and here the 
peripatetic Cheap Jack, holding aloft his quack 
cures for human ills ; here the sleek capitalist, 
and there the sinewy laborer ; here the man of 
science, and here the shoe-black ; here the poet, 
and here the water-rate collector ; here the cabi- 
net minister, and here the ballet dancer ; here a 
red-nosed publican, shouting the praises of his 
vats; and here a temperance lecturer at fifty 
pounds a night; here a judge, and there a swind- 
ler ; here a priest, and there a gambler ; here a 
jeweled duchess, smiling and gracious ; here a 
thin lodging-house keeper, irritable with cooking; 
and here a wabbling, strutting thing, tawdry in 
paint and finery. 

Cheek by cheek, they struggle onward. Scream- 
44 



On Getting On in the World. 



ing, cursing, and praying, laughing, singing, and 
moaning, they rush past side by side. Their 
speed never slackens, the race never ends. There 
is no way-side rest for them, no halt by cooling 
fountains, no pause beneath green shades. On, 
on, on — on through the heat and the crowd and 
the dust — on, or they will be trampled down and 
lost — on, with throbbing brain and tottering 
limbs — on, till the heart grows sick, and the eyes 
grow blurred, and a gurgling groan tells those 
behind they may close up another space. 

And yet in spite of the killing pace and the 
stony track, who but the sluggard or the dolt can 
hold aloof from the course? Who — like the 
belated traveler that stands watching fairy revels 
till he snatches and drains the goblin cup, and 
springs into the whirling circle — can view the 
mad tumult, and not be drawn into its midst? 
Not I, for one. I confess to the way-side arbor, 
the pipe of contentment, and the lotus leaves 
being altogether unsuitable metaphors. They 
sounded very nice and philosophical, but I'm 
afraid I am not the sort of person to sit in arbors, 
smoking pipes, when there is any fun going on 
outside. I think I more resemble the Irishman 
who, seeing a crowd collecting, sent his little girl 
45 



On Getting On in the World. 

out to ask if there was going to be a row — " 'Cos, 
if so, father would like to be in it." 

I love the fierce strife. I like to watch it. I 
like to hear of people getting on in it — battling 
their way bravely and fairly — that is, not slipping 
through by luck or trickery. It stirs one's old 
Saxon fighting blood, like the tales of " knights 
who fought 'gainst fearful odds ' ' that thrilled us 
in our school-boys days. 

And fighting the battle of life is fighting against 
fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons 
in this nineteenth century, and the golden casket 
that they guard is not so easy to win as it 
appears in the story-books. There, Algernon 
takes one long, last look at the ancestral hall, 
dashes the tear-drop from his eye, and goes off — 
to return in three years' time, rolling in riches. 
The authors do not tell us " how it's done," whicli 
is a pity, for it would surely prove exciting. 

But then not one novelist in a thousand ever 
does tell us the real story of his hero. He lingers 
for a dozen pages over a tea-party, but sums up a 
life's history with ''he had become one of our 
merchant princes," or, ''he was now a great 
artist, with the whole world at his feet." Why, 
there is more real life in one of Gilbert's patter- 
46 



On Getting On in the World. 

songs than in half the biographical novels ever 
written. He relates to us all the various steps by 
which his office-boy rose to be the '' ruler of the 
queen's navee," and explains to us how the brief- 
less barrister managed to become a great and 
good judge, " ready to try this breach of promise 
of marriage." It is in the petty details, not in 
the great results, that the interest of existence 
lies. 

What we really want is a novel showing us all 
the hidden under-current of an ambitious man's 
career — his struggles, and failures, and hopes, his 
disappointments and victories. It would be an 
immense success. I am sure the wooing of 
Fortune would prove quite as interesting a tale 
as the wooing of any flesh and blood maiden ; 
though, by the way, it would read extremely 
similar, for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients 
painted her, very like a woman — not quite so 
unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so — 
and the pursuit is much the same in one case as 
in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet — 

" Court a mistress, she denies you ; 
Let her alone, she will court you " — 

puts them both in a nutshell. A woman never 
47 



On Getting On in the World. 

thoroughly cares for her lover until he has ceased 
to care for her; and it is not until you have 
snapped your fingers in Fortune's face, and 
turned on your heel, that she begins to smile 
upon you. 

But, by that time, you do not much care 
whether she smiles or frowns. Wliy could she not 
have smiled when her smiles would have thrilled 
you with ecstasy ? Everything comes too late in 
this world. 

Good people say that it is quite right and 
proper that it should be so, and that it proves 
ambition is wicked. 

Bosh ! Good people are altogether Avrong. 
(They always arc, in my opinion. We never 
agree on any single point.) What would the 
world do without ambitious people, I should like 
to know ? Why, it would be as flabby as a Nor- 
folk dumpling. Ambitious people are the leaven 
which raises it into wholesome bread. Without 
ambitious people the world would never get up. 
They are busy-bodies who are about early in the 
morning, hammering, shouting, and rattling the 
fire-irons, and rendering it generally impossible 
for the rest of the house to remain in bed. 

Wrong to be ambitious, forsooth ! The men 
48 



On Getting On in the World. 

wrong who, with bent back and sweating brow, 
cut the smooth road over which Humanity 
marches forward from generation to generation ! 
Men wrong for using the talents that their Master 
has entrusted to them — for toiling while others 
play! 

Of course, they are seeking their reward. Man 
is not given that God-like unselfishness that thinks 
only of others' good. But in working for them- 
selves they are working for us all. We are so 
bound together that no man can labor for himself 
alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf 
helps to mold the universe. The stream, in 
struggling onward, turns the mill-wheel; the 
coral insect, fashioning its tiny cells, joins con- 
tinents to one another ; and the ambitious man, 
building a pedestal for himself, leaves a monu- 
ment to posterity. Alexander and Csesar fought 
for their own ends, but, in doing so, they put a 
belt of civilization half round the earth. Stephen- 
son, to win a fortune, invented the steam-engine; 
and Shakespeare wrote his plays in order to keep 
a comfortable home for Mrs. Shakespeare and the 
little Shakespeares. 

Contented, unambitious 'people are all very 
well in their way. They form a neat, useful 
4 49 



On Getting On in the World. 

background for great portraits to be painted 
against; and they make a respectable, if not 
particularly intelligent, audience for the active 
spirits of the age to play before. I have not a 
word to say against contented people so long as 
they keep quiet.* But do not, for goodness' sake, 
let them go strutting about, as they are so fond of 
doing, crying out that they are the true models 
for the whole species. Why, they are the dead- 
heads, the drones in the great hive, the street 
crowds that lounge about, gaping at those who 
are working. 

And let them not imagine either — as they are 
also fond of doing — that they are very wise and 
philosophical, and that it is a very artful thing to 
be contented. It may be true that *' a contented 
mind is happy anywhere," but so is a Jerusalem 
pony, and the consequence is that both are put 
anywhere and are treated anyhow. ''Oh, you 
need not bother about him,^* is what is said; 
''he is very contented as he is, and it would be 
a pity to disturb him." And so your contented 
party is passed over, and the discontented man 
gets his place. 

If you are foolish enough to be contented, 
don't show it, but grumble with the rest; and if 
50 



On Getting On in the World. 

you can do with a httle, ask for a great deal. 
Because if you don't you won't get any. In this 
world it is necessary to adopt the principle pur- 
sued by the plaintiff in an action for damages, 
and to demand ten times more than you are 
ready to accept. If you can feel satisfied with a 
hundred, begin by insisting on a thousand; if 
you start by suggesting a hundred, you will only 
get ten. 

It was by not following this simple plan that 
poor Jean Jacques Rousseau came to such grief. 
He fixed the summit of his earthly bliss at living 
in an orchard with an amiable woman and a cow, 
and he never attained even that. He did get as 
far as the orchard, but the woman was not ami- 
able, and she brought her mother with her, and 
there was no cow. Now, if he had made up his 
mind for a large country estate, a houseful of 
angels, and a cattle show, he might have lived to 
possess his kitchen garden and one head of live 
stock, and even possibly have come across that 
rara avis — a really amiable woman. 

What a terribly dull affair, too, life must be for 

contented people ! How heavy the time must 

hang upon their hands, and what on earth do 

they occupy their thoughts with, supposing that 

51 



On Getting On in the World. 

they have any ? Reading the paper and smoking 
seems to be the intellectual food of the majority 
of them, to which the more energetic add play- 
ing the flute and talking about the affairs of the 
next-door neighbor. 

They never knew the excitement of expecta- 
tion, nor the stern delight of accomplished effort, 
such as stirs the pulse of the man who has objects, 
and hopes, and plans. To the ambitious man, 
life is a brilliant game — a game that calls forth 
all his tact, and energy, and nerve — a game to be 
won, in the long run, by the quick eye and the 
steady hand, and yet having sufficient chance 
about its working out to give it all the glorious 
zest of uncertainty. He exults in it, as the 
strong swimmer in the heaving billows, as the 
athlete in the wrestle, as the soldier in the battle. 

And if he be defeated, he wins the grim joy of 
fighting; if he lose the race, he at least has had 
a run. Better to work and fail than to sleep 
one's life away. 

So, walk up, walk up, walk up. Walk up, 
ladies and gentlemen ! walk up, boys and girls ! 
Show your skill and try your strength; brave 
your luck, and prove your pluck. Walk up ! 
The show is never closed, and the game is always 
52 



On Being Idle. 

going. The only genuine sport in all the fair, 
gentlemen — highly respectable and strictly moral 
— patronized by the nobility, clergy, and gentry. 
Established in the year one, gentlemen, and been 
flourishing ever since ! — walk up. Walk up, 
ladies and gentlemen, and take a hand. There 
are prizes for all, and all can play. There is 
gold for the man and fame for the boy; rank for 
the maiden and pleasure for the fool. So walk 
up, ladies and gentlemen, walk up! — all prizes, 
and no blanks; for some few win, and as to the 
rest, why — 

" The rapture of pursuing 
Is the prize the vanquished gain." 

ON BEING IDLE. 

1\ TOW this is a subject on which I flatter myself 
^ ^ I really am au fait. The gentleman who, 
when I was young, bathed me at wisdom's font 
for nine guineas a term — no extras — used to say 
he never knew a boy who could do less work in 
more time; and I remember my poor grand- 
mother once incidentally observing, in the course 
of an instruction upon the use of the prayer- 
book, that it was highly improbable that I should 
53 



On Being Idle. 

ever do much that I ought to do, but that she felt 
convinced, beyond a doubt, that I should leave 
undone pretty well everything that I ought to do. 

I am afraid I have somewhat belied half the 
dear old lady's prophecy. Heaven help me ! I 
have done a good many things that I ought not 
to have done, in spite of my laziness. But I 
have fully confirmed the accuracy of her judg- 
ment so far as neglecting much that I ought not 
to have neglected is concerned. Idling always 
has been my strong point. I take no credit to 
myself in the matter — it is a gift. Few i)Ossess 
it. There are plenty of lazy people and plenty 
of slow-coaches, but a genuine idler is a rarity. 
He is not a man who slouches al^out with his 
hands in his pockets. On the contrary, his most 
startling characteristic is that he is always in- 
tensely busy. 

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly un- 
less one has plenty of work to do. There is no 
fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to 
do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, 
and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, 
to be sweet must be stolen. 

Many years ago, when I was a young man, I 
was taken very ill — I never could see myself that 
54 



On Being Idle. 

much was the matter with me, except that I had 
a beastly cold. But I suppose it was something 
very serious, for the doctor said that I ought to 
have come to him a month before, and that if it 
(whatever it was) had gone on for another week 
he would not have answered for the consequences. 
It is an extraordinary thing, but I never knew a 
doctor called into any case yet, but what it 
transpired that another day's delay would have 
rendered cure hopeless. Our medical guide, 
philosopher, and friend is like the hero in a 
melodrama, he always comes upon the scene just, 
and only just, in the nick of time. It is Provi- 
dence, that is what it is. 

Well, as I was saying, I was very ill, and was 
ordered to Buxton for a month, with strict injunc- 
tions to do nothing whatever all the while that I 
was there. ''Rest is what you require," said 
the doctor, ''perfect rest." 

It seemed a delightful i)rospect. "This man 
evidently understands my complaint," said I, 
and I pictured to myself a glorious time — a four 
weeks' dolce far niente with a dasli of illness in 
it. Not too much illness, but just illness enough 
— just sufficient to give it the flavor of suffering, 
and make it poetical. I should get up late, sip 
55 



On Being Idle. 

chocolate, and have my breakfast in slippers and 
a dressing-gown. I should lie out in the garden 
in a hammock, and read sentimental novels with 
a melancholy ending, until the book would fall 
from my listless hand, and I should recline there, 
dreamily gazing into the deep blue of the firma- 
ment, watching the fleecy clouds floating like 
white-sailed ships across its depths, and listening 
to the joyous song of the birds, and the low rust- 
ling of the trees. Or, when I became too weak 
to go out-of-doors, I should sit propped up with 
pillows, at the open window of the ground-floor 
front, and look wasted and interesting, so that all 
the pretty girls would sigh as they passed by. 

And, twice a day, I should go down in a Bath 
chair to the Colonnade, to drink the waters. 
Oh, those waters ! I knew nothing about them 
then, and was rather taken with the idea. 
" Drinking the waters " sounded fashionable and 
Queen Anneified, and I thought I should like 
them. But, ugh ! after the first three or four 
mornings ! Sam Weller's description of them, as 
'' having a taste of warm flat-irons," conveys 
only a faint idea of their hideous nauseousness. 
If anything could make a sick man get well 
quickly, it would be the knowledge that he must 
56 



On Being Idle. 

drink a glassful of them every day until he had 
recovered. I drank them neat for six consecutive 
days, and they nearly killed me ; but, after them, 
I adopted the plan of taking a stiff glass of brandy 
and water immediately on the top of them, and 
found much relief thereby. I have been informed 
since, by various eminent medical gentlemen, 
that the alcohol must have entirely counteracted 
the effects of the chalybeate properties contained 
in the water. I am glad I was lucky enough to 
hit upon the right thing. 

But *' drinking the waters" was ( nly a small 
portion of the torture I experienced during that 
memorable month, a month which was, without 
exception, the most miserable I have ever spent. 
During the best part of it, I religiously followed 
the doctor's mandate, and did nothing whatever, 
except moon about the house and garden, and go 
out for two hours a day in a Bath chair. That did 
break the monotony to a certain extent. There 
is more excitement about Bath-chairing — espe- 
cially if you are not used to the exhilarating ex- 
ercise — than might appear to the casual observer. 
A sense of danger, such as a mere outsider might 
not understand, is ever present to the mind of the 
occupant. He feels convinced every minute that 
57 



On Being Idle. 

the whole concern is going over, a conviction 
which becomes especially lively whenever a ditch 
or a stretch of newly macadamized road comes 
in sight. Every vehicle that passes he expects 
is going to run into him ; and he never finds 
himself ascending or descending a hill without 
immediately beginning to speculate upon his 
chances, supposing — ^as seems extremely probable 
— that the weak-kneed controller of his destiny- 
should let go. 

But even this diversion failed to enliven after 
a while, and the ennui became perfectly unbeara- 
ble. I felt my mind giving way under it. It 
is not a strong mind, and I thought it would be 
unwise to tax it too far. So somewhere about 
the twentieth morning, I got up early, had a 
good breakfast, and walked straight off to Hay- 
field, at the foot of the Kinder Scout — a pleasant, 
busy, little town, reached through a lovely valley, 
and with two sweetly pretty women in it. At 
least they were sweetly pretty then ; one passed 
me on the bridge, and, I think, smiled ; and the 
other was standing at an open door, making an 
unremunerative investment of kisses upon a red- 
faced baby. But it is years ago, and I dare say 
they have both grown stout and snappish since 
58 



On Being Idle. 

that time. Coming back, I saw an old man 
breaking stones, and it roused such strong long- 
ing in me to use my arms that I offered him a 
drink to let me take his place. He was a kindly 
old man, and he humored me. I went for those 
stones with the accumulated energy of three 
weeks, and did more work in half an hour than 
he had done all day. But it did not make him 
jealous. 

Having taken the plunge, I went further and 
further into dissipation, going out for a long 
walk every morning, listening to the band in the 
pavilion every evening. But the days still passed 
slowly notwithstanding, and I was heartily glad 
when the last one came, and I was being whirled 
away from gouty, consumptive Buxton to London 
with its stem work and life. I looked out of the 
carriage as we rushed through Hendon in the 
evening. The lurid glare overhanging the mighty 
city seemed to warm my heart, and when, later 
on, my cab rattled out of St. Pancras's Station, 
the old familiar roar that came swelling up around 
me sounded the sweetest music I had heard for 
many a long day. 

I certainly did not enjoy that month's idling. 
I like idling when I ought not to be idling ; not 
59 



On Being Idle. 

when it is the only thing I have to do. That is 
my pig-headed nature. The time when I like 
best to stand with my back to the fire, calcula- 
ting how much I owe, is when my desk is heaped 
highest with letters that must be answered by the 
next post. When I like to dawdle longest over 
my dinner is when I have a heavy evening's work 
before me. And if, for some urgent reason, I 
ought to be up particularly early in the morning, 
it is then, more than any other time, that I love 
to lie an extra half hour in bed. 

Ah ! how delicious it is to turn over and go to 
sleep again: "just for five minutes! " Is there 
any human being, I wonder, besides the hero of 
a Sunday-school 'Hale for boys," who ever gets 
up willingly ? There are some men to whom 
getting up at the proper time is an utter impossi- 
bility. If eight o'clock happens to be the time 
that they should turn out, then they lie till half- 
past. If circumstances change, and half-past 
eight becomes early enough for them, then it is 
nine before they can rise ; they are like the 
statesman of whom it was said that he was always 
punctually half an hour late. They try all man- 
ner of schemes. They buy alarm clocks (artful 
contrivances, they go off at the wrong time, and 
60 




Idle Thoughts. p. 66. 

"HE CAN LOOK INTO SUNNY EYES AND NOT BE DAZZLED." 



On Being Idle. 

alarm the wrong people). They tell Sarah Jane 
to knock at the door and call them, and Sarah 
Jane does knock at the door, and does call them, 
and they grunt back '^ Awri," and then go com- 
fortably to sleep again. I knew one man who 
would actually get out, and have a cold bath; 
and even that was of no use, for, afterward, he 
would jump into bed again to warm himself. 

I think myself that I could keep out of bed all 
right, if I once got out. It is the wrenching 
away of the head from the pillow that I find so 
hard, and no amount of overnight determination 
makes it easier. I say to myself, after having 
wasted the whole evening, ''Well, I won't do 
any more work to-night ; I'll get up early to-mor- 
row morning ;" and I am thoroughly resolved to 
do so — then. In the morning, however, I feel 
less enthusiastic about the idea, and reflect that it 
would have been much better if I had stopped up 
last night. And then there is the trouble of 
dressing, and the more one thinks about that, the 
more one wants to put it off. 

It is a strange thing this bed, this m.imic grave, 

where we stretch our tired limbs, and sink away 

so quietly into the silence and rest. " Oh, bed, 

oh, bed, delicious bed, that heaven on earth to 

6i 



On Being Idle. 

the weary head,' ' as sung poor Hood, you are a 
kind old nurse to us fretful boys and girls. 
Clever and foolish, naughty and good, you take 
us all in your motherly lap, and hush our way- 
ward crying. The strong man full of care — the 
sick man full of pain — the little maiden, sobbing 
for her faithless lover — like children, we lay our 
aching heads on your white bosom, and you gently 
soothe us off to by-by. 

Ouc trouble is sore indeed when you turn away 
and will not comfort us. How long the dawn 
seems coming, when we can not sleep ! Oh I 
those hideous nights, when we toss and turn in 
fever and pain, when we lie, like living men 
among the dead, staring out into the dark hours 
that drift so slowly between us and the light. 
And oh ! those still more hideous nights, when we 
sit by another in pain, when the low fire startles 
us every now and then with a fallen cinder, and 
the tick of the clock seems a hammer, beating out 
the life that we are watching. 

But enough of beds and bedrooms. I have 
kept to them too long, even for an idle fellow. 
Let us come out, and have a smoke. That wastes 
time just as well, and does not look so bad. 
Tobacco has been a blessing to us idlers. What 
62 



On Being Idle. 

the civil-service clerks before Sir Walter's time 
found to occupy their minds with, it is hard to 
imagine. I attribute the quarrelsome nature of 
the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want 
of the soothing weed. They had no work to do, 
and could not smoke, and the consequence was 
they were forever fighting and rowing. If, by 
any extraordinary chance, there was no war going, 
then they got up a deadly family feud with the 
next-door neighbor, and if, in spite of this, they 
still had a few spare moments on their hands, 
they occupied them with discussions as to whose 
sweetheart was the best looking, the arguments 
employed on both sides being battle-axes, clubs, 
etc. Questions of taste were soon decided in 
those days. When a twelfth century youth fell in 
love, he did not take three paces backward, gaze 
into her eyes, and tell her she was too beautiful 
to live. He said he would step outside and see 
about it. And if, when he got out, he met a 
man and broke his head — the other man's head, 
I mean — then that proved that his — the first 
fellow's — girl was a pretty girl. But if the other 
fellow broke his head — not his own, you know, 
but the other fellow's — the other fellow to the 
second fellow, that is, because of course the other 
63 



On Being Idle. 

fellow would only be the other fellow to him, not 
the first fellow, who — well, if he broke his head, 
then his girl — not the other fellow's, but the fel- 
low who was the — Look here, if A broke B's 
head, then A's girl was a pretty girl ; but if B 
broke A's head, then A's girl wasn't a pretty girl, 
but B's girl was. That was their method of con- 
ducting art criticism. 

Nowadays we light a pipe, and let the girls 
fight it out among themselves. 

They do it very well. They are getting to do 
all our work. They are doctors, and barristers, 
and artists. They manage theatres, and promote 
swindles, and edit newspapers. I am looking 
forward to the time when we men shall have 
nothing to do but lie in bed till twelve, read two 
novels a day, have nice little five-o'clock teas all 
to ourselves, and tax our brains with nothing 
more trying than discussions upon the latest pat- 
terns in trousers, and arguments as to what Mr. 
Jones's coat was made of, and whether it fitted 
him. It is a glorious prospect— for idle fellowSc 



64 



On Being in Love. 



ON BEING IN LOVE. 

V/'OU'VE been in love, of course! If not 
^ you've got it to come. Love is like the 
measles; we all have to go through it. Also, like 
the measles, we take it only once. One need 
never be afraid of catching it a second time. 
The man who has had it can go into the most 
dangerous places, and play the most fool-hardy 
tricks with perfect safety. He can picnic in 
shady woods, ramble through leafy aisles, and 
linger on mossy seats to watch the sunset. He 
fears a quiet country house no more than he 
would his own club. He can join a family party 
to go down the Rhine. He can, to see the last 
of a friend, venture into the very jaws of the 
marriage ceremony itself. He can keep his head 
through the whirl of a ravishing waltz, and rest 
afterward in a dark conservatory, catching nothing 
more lasting than a cold. He can brave a moon- 
light walk adown sweet-scented lanes, or a 
twilight pull among the somber rushes. He can 
get over a stile without danger, scramble through 
a tangled hedge without being caught, come 
5 65 



On Being in Love. 

down a slippery path without falling. He can 
look into sunny eyes, and not be dazzled. He 
listens to the siren voices, yet sails on with un- 
veered helm. He clasps white hands in his, but 
*vo electric ''Lulu "-like force holds him bound 
in their dainty pressure. 

No, we never sicken with love twice. Cupid 
spends no second arrow on the same heart. Love's 
handmaids are our lifelong friends. Respect, 
and Admiration, and Affection, our doors may 
always be left open for, but their great celestial 
master, in his royal progress, pays but one visit, 
and departs. We like, we cherish, we are very, 
very fond of — but we never love again. A man's 
heart is a fire-work that once in its time flashes 
heavenward. Meteor-like it blazes for a moment, 
and lights with its glory the whole world beneath. 
Then the night of our sordid common-place life 
closes in around it, and the burned-out case, fall- 
ing back to earth, lies useless and uncared for, 
slowly smoldering into ashes. Once, breaking 
loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as mighty 
old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olympian 
mount, and snatch from Phoebus' s chariot the fire 
of the gods. Happy those who, hastening down 
again ere it dies out, can kindle their earthly. 
66 



On Being in Love. 

altars at its flame. Love is too pure a light to 
burn long among the noisome gases that we 
breathe, but before it is choked out we may use 
it as a torch to ignite the cosy fire of affection. 

And, after all, that warming glow is more 
suited to our cold little back parlor of a world 
than is the burning spirit, love. Love should be 
the vestal fire of some mighty temple — some vast, 
dim fane whose organ music is the rolling of the 
spheres. Affection will burn cheerily when the 
white flame of love is flickered out. Affection is 
a fire that can be fed from day to day, and be 
piled up ever higher as the wintery years draw 
nigh. Old men and women can sit by it with 
their thin hands clasped, the little children can 
nestle down in front, the friend and neighbor 
has his welcome corner by its side, and even 
shaggy Fido and sleek Titty can toast their noses 
at the bars. 

Let us heap the coals of kindness upon that 
fire. Throw on your pleasant words, your gentle 
pressures of the hand, your thoughtful and unsel- 
fish deeds. Fan it with good-humor, patience, 
and forbearance. You can let the wind blow 
and the rain fall unheeded then, for your hearth 
will be warm, and bright, and the faces round 
67 



On Being in Love. 

it will make sunshine in spite of the clouds with- 
out. 

I am afraid, dear Edwin and Angelina, you 
expect too much from love. You think there is 
enough of your little hearts to feed this fierce, 
devouring passion for all your long lives. Ah, 
young folk! don't rely too much upon that un- 
steady flicker. It will dwindle and dwindle as 
the months roll on, and there is no replenishing 
the fuel. You will watch it die out in anger and 
disappointment. To each it will seem that it is 
the other who is growing colder. Edwin sees 
with bitterness that Angelina no longer runs to 
the gate to meet him, all smiles and blushes ; and 
when he has a cough now, she doesn't begin to 
cry, and, putting her arms round his neck, say 
that she can not live without him. The most 
she will probably do is to suggest a lozenge, and 
even that in a tone implying that it is the noise 
more than anything else she is anxious to get 
rid of. 

Poor little Angelina, too, sheds silent tears, for 
Edwin has given up carrying her old handkerchief 
in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. 

Both are astonished at the falling off in the 
other one, but neither sees their own change. It 
68 



On Being in Love. 



they did, they would not suffer as they do. They 
would look for the cause in the right quarter — in 
the littleness of poor human nature — ^join hands 
over their common failing, and start buildiaig 
their house anew on a more earthly and enduring 
foundation. But we are so blind to our own 
shortcomings, so wide awake to those of others. 
Everything that happens to us is always the other 
person's fault. Angelina would have gone on 
loving Edwin for ever and ever and ever, if only 
Edwin had not grown so strange and different. 
Edwin would have adored Angelina through 
eternity, if Angelina had only remained the same 
as when he first adored her. 

It is a cheerless hour for you both, when the 
lamp of love has gone out, and the fire of affec- 
tion is not yet lighted, and you have to grope 
about m the cold raw dawn of life to kindle it. 
God grant it catches light before the day is too 
far spent. Many sit shivering by the dead coals 
till night come. 

But, there ! of what use is it to preach ? Who 
that feels the rush of young love through his.veins 
can think it will ever flow feeble and slow ? To 
the boy of twenty it seems impossible that he 
will not love as wildly at sixty as he does then.- 
69 



On Being in Love. 

He can not call to mind any middle-aged or 
elderly gentleman of his acquaintance who is 
known to exhibit symptoms of frantic attach- 
ment, but that does not interfere in his belief in 
himself. His love will never fail, whoever else's 
may. Nobody ever loved as he loves, and so, of 
course, the rest of the world's experience can be 
no guide in his case. Alas, alas ! ere thirty he 
has joined the ranks of the sneerers. It is not 
his fault. Our passions, both the good and bad, 
cease with our blushes. We do not hate, nor 
grieve, nor joy, nor despair in our thirties like 
we did in our teens. Disappointment does not 
suggest suicide, and we quaff success without 
intoxication. 

We take all things in a minor key as we grow 
older. There are few majestic passages in the 
latter acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less 
ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasona- 
ble and conveniently adapts itself to circum- 
stances. And love — love dies. " Irreverence 
for the dreams of youth " soon creeps like a kill- 
ing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and 
the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, 
and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils 
round the world, there is left but a sapless stump. 
70 



On Being in Love. 

My fair friends will deem all this rank heresy, I 
know. So far from a man's not loving after he 
has passed boyhood, it is not till there is a good 
deal of gray in his hair that they think his pro- 
testations at all worthy of attention. Young 
ladies take their notions of our sex from the 
novels written by their own, and compared with 
the monstrosities that masquerade for men in the 
pages of that nightmare literature, Pythagoras's 
plucked bird and Frankenstein's demon were 
fair average specimens of humanity. 

In these so-called books, the chief lover, or 
Greek god, as he is admiringly referred to — by 
the way, they do not say which "Greek god" 
it is that the gentleman bears such a striking 
likeness to, it might be hump-backed Vulcan, or 
double-faced Janus, or even driveling Silenus, 
the god of abstruse mysteries. He resembles the 
whole family of them, however, in being a black- 
guard, and perhaps this is what is meant. To 
even the little manliness his classical prototypes 
possessed, though, he can lay no claim whatever, 
being a listless, effeminate noodle, on the shady 
side of forty. But oh ! the depth and strength 
of this elderly party's emotion for some bread- 
and-butter school-girl ! Hide your heads, ye 
71 



On Being in Love. 

young Romeos and Leandcrs, this blase old beau 
loves with an hysterical fervor that requires four 
adjectives to every noun to properly describe. 

It is well, dear ladies, for us old sinners, that 
you study only books. Did you read mankind, 
you would know that the lad's shy stammering 
tells a truer tale than our bold eloquence. A 
boy's love comes from a ftiU heart ; a man's is 
more often the result of a full stomach. Indeed, 
a man's sluggish current may not be called love, 
compared with the rushing fountain that wells up 
when a boy's heart is struck with the heavenly 
rod. If you would taste love, drink of the 
pure stream that youth pours out at your feet. 
Do not wait till it has become a muddy river 
before you stoop to catch its waves. 

Or is it that you like its bitter flavor ; that the 
clear, limpid water is insipid to your palate, and 
that the pollution of its after-course gives it a 
relish to your lips ? Must we believe those who 
tell us that a hand foul with the filth of a shame- 
ful life is the only one a young girl cares to be 
caressed by ? 

That is the teaching that is bawled out day by 
day from between those yellow covers. Do they 
ever pause to think, I wonder, those devil's lady- 

72 



On Being in Love. 

helps, what mischief they are doin^^ crawling 
about God's garden, and telling childish Eves 
and silly Adams that sin is sweet, and that 
decency is ridiculous and vulgar? How many 
an innocent girl do they not degrade into an 
evil-minded woman ? To how many a weak lad 
do they not point out the dirty by-path as the 
shortest cut to a maiden's heart ? It is not as if 
they wrote of life as it really is. Speak truth, 
and right will take care of itself. But their pic- 
tures are coarse daubs painted from the sickly 
fancies of their own diseased imaginations. 

We want to think of women not — as their own 
sex would show them — as Loreleis luring us to 
destruction, but as good angels beckoning us 
upward. They have more power for good or 
evil than they dream of. It is just at the very 
age when a man's character is forming that he 
tumbles into love, and then the lass he loves has 
the making or marring of him. Unconsciously 
he molds himself to what she would have him, 
good or bad. I am sorry to have to be ungal- 
lant enough to say that I do not think they 
always use their influence for the best. Too 
often the female world is bounded hard and fast 
within the limits of the commonplace. Their 
73 



On Being in Love. 

ideal hero is a prince of littleness, and to become 
that many a powerful mind, enchanted by love, 
is " lost to life and use, and name and fame." 

And yet, women, you could make us so much 
better, if you only would. It rests with you more 
than with all the preachers, to roll this world a 
little nearer heaven. Chivalry is not dead; it 
only sleeps for want of work to do. It is you 
who must wake it to noble deeds. You must 
be worthy of knightly worship. You must be 
higher than ourselves. It was for Una that the 
Red Cross Knight did war. For no painted, 
mincing Court dame could the dragon have been 
slain. Oh, ladies fair, be fair in mind and soul 
as well as face, so that brave knights may win 
glory in your service ! Oh, woman, throw off 
your disguising cloaks of selfishness, effrontery, 
and affectation ! Stand forth once more a queen 
in your royal robe of simple purity. A thousand 
swords, now rusting in ignoble sloth, shall leap 
from their scabbards to do battle for your honor 
against wrong. A thousand Sir Rolands shall 
lay lance in rest, and Fear, Avarice, Pleasure, 
and Ambition shall go down in the dust before 
your colors. 

What noble deeds were we not ripe for in the 
74 



Oil Being in Love. 

days when we loved? What noble lives could 
we not have lived for her sake ? Our love was a 
religion we could have died for. It was no mere 
human creature like ourselves that we adored. It 
was a queen that we paid homage to, a goddess 
that we worshipped. 

And how madly we did worship ! And how 
sweet it was to worship ! Ah, lad, cherish love's 
young dream while it lasts ! You will know, too 
soon, how truly little Tom Moore sung when he 
said that there was nothing half so sweet in life. 
Even when it brings misery, it is a wild, romantic 
misery, all unlike the dull, worldly pain of after 
sorrows. When you have lost her — when the 
light is gone out from your life, and the world 
stretches before you a long, dark horror, even 
then a half enchantment mingles with your 
•despair. 

And who would not risk its terrors to gain its 
raptures ? Ah, what raptures they were ! The 
mere recollection thrills you. How delicious it 
was to tell her that you loved her, that you lived 
for her, that you would die for her ! How you 
did rave, to be sure ; what floods of extravagant 
nonsense you poured forth, and oh, how cruel it 
was of her to pretend not to believe you ! In 
75 



On Being in Love. 



what awe you stood of her ! How miserable you 
were when you had offended her ! And yet, how 
pleasant to be bullied by her, and to sue for 
pardon without having the slightest notion of 
what your fault was ! How dark the world was 
when she snubbed you, as she often did, the 
little rogue, just to see you look wretched ; 
how sunny when she smiled ! How jealous 
you were of every one about her ! How you 
hated every man she shook hands with, e\ery 
woman she kissed — the maid that did her hair, 
the boy that cleaned her shoes, the dog she 
nursed — though you had to be respectful to the 
last named ! How you looked forAvard to seeing 
lier, how stupid you were when you did see her, 
staring at her without saying a word ! How 
impossible it was for you to go out at any time 
of the day or night without finding yourself 
eventually opposite her windows ! You hadn't 
plu' k enough to go in, but you hung about the 
corner and gazed at the outside. Oh, if the house 
had only caught fire — it was insured, so it 
wouldn't have mattered — and you could have 
rushed in and saved her at the risk of your life, 
and ha\'e been terribly burned and injured ! 
Anything to serve her. Even in little things 
76 



On Being in Love. 

that was so sweet. How you would watch her, 
spaniel-like, to anticipate her slightest wish ! 
How proud you were to do her bidding ! How 
delightful it was to be ordered about by her ! 
To devote your whole life to her, and to never 
think of yourself, seemed such a simple thing. 
You would go without a holiday to lay an hum- 
ble offering at her shrine, and felt more than 
repaid if she only deigned to accept it. How 
precious to you was everything that she had 
hallowed by her touch — her little glove, the rib- 
bon she had worn, the rose that had nestled in 
her hair, and whose withered leaves still mark 
the» poems you never care to look at now ! 

And oh, how beautiful she was, how wondrous 
beautiful ! It was as some angel entering the 
room, and all else became plain and earthly. She 
was too sacred to be touched. It seemed almost 
presumption to gaze at her. You would as soon 
have thought of kissing her as of singing comic 
songs in a cathedral. It was desecration enough 
to kneel and timidly raise the gracious little hand 
to your lips. 

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days, 
when we were unselfish and pure-minded ; those 
foolish days, when our simple hearts were full of 
77 



On the Weather. 

truth, and faith, and reverenc : ! Ah, those fool- 
ish days of noble longings and of noble strivings ! 
And oh, these wise, clever days, when we know 
that money is the only prize worth striving for, 
when we believe in nothing else but meanness 
and lies, when we care for no living creature but 
ourselves ! 



ON THE WEATHER. 

T^HINGS do go so contrary-like with me. I 
-■• wanted to hit upon an especially novel, out- 
of-the-way subject for one of these articles. " I 
will write one paper about something altogether 
new," I said to myself; ''something that nobody 
else has ever written or talked about before ; and 
then I can have it all my own way." And I 
went about for days, trying to think of some- 
thing of this kind, and I couldn't. And Mrs. 
Cutting, our charwoman, came yesterday — I don't 
mind mentioning her name, because I know she 
will not see this book. She would not look at 
such a frivolous publication. She never reads 
anything but the Bible and ''Lloyd's Weekly 
News." All other literature she considers un- 
necessary and sinful. 

78' 



On the Weather. 

She said : " Lor', sir, you do look worried." 

I said: ''Mrs. Cutting, I am trying to think 
of a subject the discussion of which will come 
upon the world in the nature of a startler — some 
subject upon which no previous human being has 
ever said a word — some subject that will attract 
by its novelty, invigorate by its surprising fresh- 
ness." 

She laughed, and said I was a funny gentleman. 

That's my luck again. When I make serious 
observations, people chuckle ; when I attempt a 
joke, nobody sees it. I had a beautiful one last 
week. I thought it so good, and I worked it up, 
and brought it in artfully at a dinner-party. I 
forget how exactly, but we had been talking 
about the attitude of Shakespeare toward the 
Reformation, and I said something and immedi- 
ately added : ' ' Ah, that reminds me ; such a 
funny thing happened the other day in White- 
chapel." "Oh," said they, ''what was that ? " 
"Oh, 'twas awfully funny," I replied, beginning 
to giggle myself; " it will make you roar; " and 
I told it them. 

There was a dead silence when I finished — it 
was one of those long jokes, too — and then, at 
last, somebody said : " And that was the joke ? '* 
79 



On the Weather. 

I assured them that it was, and they were very 
poHte, and took my word for it. All but one old 
gentleman, at the other end of the table, who 
wanted to know which was the joke — what he 
said to her, or what she said to him ; and we 
argued it out. 

Some people are too much the other way. I 
knew a fellow once whose natural tendency to 
laugh at everything was so strong that, if you 
wanted to talk seriously to him, you had to ex- 
plain beforehand that what you were going to 
say would not be amusing. Unless you got him 
to clearly understand this, he would go off into 
fits of merriment over every word you uttered. 
I have known him, on being asked the time, stop 
short in the middle of the road, slap his leg, and 
burst into a roar of laughter. One never dared 
say anything really funny to that man. A good 
joke would have killed him on the spot. 

In the present instance, I vehemently repudi- 
ated the accusation of frivolity, and pressed Mrs. 
Cutting for practical ideas. She then became 
thoughtful, and hazarded ''samplers," saying 
that she never heard them spoken much of now, 
but that they used to be all the rage when she 
was a girl. 

80 



On the Weather. 

I decHned samplers, and begged her to think 
again. She pondered a long while, with a tea- 
tray in her hands, and at last suggested the 
weather, which she was sure had been most trying 
of late. 

And ever since that idiotic suggestion I have 
been unable to get the weather out of my thoughts, 
or anything else in. 

It certainly is most wretched weather. At all 
events, it is so now, at the time I am writing, and 
if it isn't particularly unpleasant when I come 
to be read, it soon will be. 

It always is wretched weather, according to us» 
The weather is like the government — always in 
the wrong. In summer time we say it is stifling; 
in winter that it is killing ; in spring and autumn 
we find fault with it for being neither one thing 
nor the other, and wish it would make up its 
mind. If it is fine, we say the country is being 
ruined for want of rain ; if it does rain, we pray 
for fine weather. If December passes without 
snow, we indignantly demand to know what has 
become of our good old-fashioned winters, and 
talk as if we had been cheated out of something 
we had bought and paid for ; and when it does 
snow, our language is a disgrace to a Christian 
6 8i 



On the Weather. 

nation. We shall never be consent until each 
man makes his own weather and keeps it to 
himself. 

If that cannot be arranged, we would rather 
do without it altogether. 

Yet I think it is only to us in cities that all 
weather is unwelcome. In her own home, the 
country. Nature is sweet in all her moods. What 
can be more beautiful than the snow, falling big 
with mystery in silent softness, decking the fields 
and trees with white as if for a fairy wedding ! 
And how delightful is a walk when the frozen 
ground rings beneath our swinging tread — when 
our blood tingles in the rare keen air, and the 
sheep dog's distant bark and children's laughter 
peal faintly clear like Alpine bells across the 
open hills 1 And then skating ! scudding with 
wings of steel across the swaying ice, waking 
whirring music as we fly. And oh, how dainty 
is spring — Nature at sweet eighteen ! When the 
little, hopeful leaves peep out so fresh and green, 
so pure and bright, like young lives pushing shyly 
out into the bustling world ; when the fruit-tree 
blossoms, pink and white, like village maidens 
in their Sunday frocks, hide each whitewashed 
cottage in a cloud of fragile splendor ; and the 
82 



On the Weather. 

cuckoo's note upon the breeze is wafted through 
the woods ! And summer, with its deep, dark- 
green, and drowsy hum — when the rain-drops 
whisper solemn secrets to the Hstening leaves, 
and the twilight lingers in the lanes ! And 
autumn ! ah, how sadly fair, with its golden 
glow, and the dying grandeur of its tinted woods 
— its blood-red sunsets^ and its ghostly evening 
mists, with its busy murmur of reapers, and its 
laden orchards, and the calling of the gleaners, 
and the festivals of praise ! 

The very rain, and sleet, and hail seem only 
Nature's useful servants, when found doing their 
simple duties in the country ; and the East Wind 
himself is nothing worse than a boisterous friend, 
when we meet him between the hedge-rows. 

But in the city, where the painted stucco blis- 
ters under the smoky sun, and the sooty rain 
brings slush and mud, and the snow lies piled in 
dirty heaps, and the chill blasts whistle down 
dingy streets, and shriek round flaring, gaslit 
corners, no face of Nature charms us. Weather 
in towns is like a skylark in a counting-house — 
out of place and in the way. Towns ought to 
be covered in, warmed by hot- water pipes, and 
lighted by electricity. The weather is a country 
83 



On the Weather. 

lass, and does not appear to advantage in town. 
We liked well enough to flirt with her in the hay- 
field; but she does not seem so fascinating when 
we meet her in Pall Mall. There is too much of 
her there. The frank, free laugh and hearty 
voice that sounded so pleasant in the dairy jars 
against the artificiality of town-bred life, and her 
ways become exceedingly trymg. 

Just lately she has been favoring us with almost 
incessant rain for about three weeks ; and I am 
a demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body, as Mr. 
Mantalini puts it. 

Our next-door neighbor comes out in the back 
garden every now and then, and says it's doing 
the country a world of good — not his coming 
out into the back garden, but the weather. He 
doesn't understand anything about it, but ever 
since he started a cucumber frame last summer, 
he has regarded himself in the light of an agri- 
culturist, and talks in this absurd way with the 
idea of impressing the rest of the terrace with 
the notion that he is a retired farmer. I can 
only hope that for this once be is correct, and 
that the weather really is doing good to some- 
thing, because it is doing me a considerable 
amount of damage. It is spoiling both my 
84 



On the Weather. 

clothes and my temper. The latter I can afford,. 
as I have a good supply of it, but it wounds me 
to the quick to see my dear old hats and trousers, 
sinking, prematurely worn and aged, beneath the 
cold world's blasts and snows. 

There was my new spring suit, too. A beauti- 
ful suit it was, and now it is hanging up so 
bespattered with mud, I can't bear to look at it. 

That was Jim's fault, that was. I should never 
have gone out in it that night, if it had not been 
for him. I was just trying it on when he came 
in. He threw up his arms with a wild yell, the 
moment he caught sight of it, and exclaimed 
that he had " got 'em again ! " 

I said : '' Docs it fit all right behind ? " 

'^ Spiffin, old man," he replied. And then 
he wanted to know if I was coming out. 

I said ' ' No " at first, but he overruled me. 
He said that a man with a suit like that had no 
right to stop indoors. '' Every citizen," said he, 
'* owes a duty to the public. Each one should 
contribute to the general happiness, as far as lies 
in his power. Come out, and give the girls a 
treat." 

Jim is slangy, I don't know where he picks it 
up. It certainly is not from me. 
85 



On the Weather. 

I said: *'Do you think it will really please 
'em?" 

He said it would be like a day in the country 
to them. 

That decided me. It was a lovely evening, 
and I went. 

When I got home, I undressed and rubbed 
myself down with whisky, put my feet in hot 
water, and a mustard plaster on my chest, had a 
basin of gruel and a glass of hot brandy and 
water, tallowed my nose and went to bed. 

These prompt and vigorous measures, aided by 
a naturally strong constitution, were the means 
of preserving my life ; but as for the suit ! Well, 
there, it isn't a suit ; it's a splash-board. 

And I did fancy that suit too. But that's just 
the way, I never do get particularly fond of 
anything in this world but what something dread- 
ful happens it, I had a tame rat when I was a 
boy, and I loved that animal as only a boy would 
love an old water-rat ; and one day it fell into a 
large dish of gooseberry-fool that was standing to 
cool in the kitchen, and 'nobody knew what be- 
came of the poor creature until the second helping. 

I do hate wet weather in town. At least, it is 
not so much the wet as the mud that I object to, 
86 



On the Weather. 

Somehow or other, I seem to possess an irresisti- 
ble alluring power over mud. I have only to show 
myself on the streets on a muddy day to be half 
smothered by it. It all comes of being so at- 
tractive, as the old lady said when she was struck 
by lightning, Other people can go out on dirty 
days, and walk about for hours without getting 
a speck upon themselves ; while if I go across the 
road, I come back a perfect disgrace to be seen 
(as in my boyish days my poor dear mother used 
often to tell me). If there were only one dab of 
mud to be found in the whole of London, I am 
convinced I should carry it off from all com- 
petitors. 

I wish I could return the affection, but I fear 
I never shall be able to. I have a horror of what 
they call the ''London particular." I feel mis- 
erable and muggy all through a dirty day, and it 
is quite a relief to pull one's clothes off and get 
into bed, out of the way of it all. Everything 
goes wrong in wet weather. I don't know how 
it is, but there always seems to me to be more 
people, and dogs, and perambulators, and cabs, 
and carts, about in wet weather than at any other 
time, and they all get in your way more, and 
everybody is so disagreeable — except myself — • 
87 



On the Weather. 

and it does make me so wild. And then, too, 
somehow, I ahvays find myself carrying more 
things in wet weather than in dry; and when you 
have a bag, and three parcels, and a newspaper, 
and it suddenly comes on to rain, you can't open 
your umbrella. 

Which reminds me of another phase of the 
weather that I can't bear, and that is April 
weather (so-called, because it always comes in 
May). Poets think it very nice. As it does not 
know its own mind five minutes together, they 
liken it to a woman ; and it is supposed to be 
very charming on that account. I don't appre- 
ciate it myself. Such lightning change business 
may be all very agreeable in a girl. It is no doubt 
highly delightful to have to do with a person 
who grins one moment about nothing at all, and 
snivels the next for precisely the same cause, and 
who then giggles, and then sulks, and who is 
rude, and affectionate, and bad-tempered, and 
jolly, and boisterous, and silent, and passionate, 
and cold, and stand-offish, and flopping, all in 
one minute (mind I don't say this. It is those 
poets. And they are supposed to be connoisseurs 
of this sort of thing) ; but in the weather, the 
disadvantages of the system are more apparent. 



On the Weather. 

A woman's tears do not make one wet, but the 
rain does; and her coldness does not lay the 
foundations of asthma and rheumatism, as the 
east wind is apt to, I can prepare for and put 
up with a regularly bad day, but these ha'porth- 
of-all-sorts kind of days do not suit me. It ag- 
gravates me to see a bright blue sky above me, 
when I am walking along wet through ; and there 
is something so exasperating about the way the sun 
comes out smiling after a drenching shower, and 
seems to say: '' Lord love you, you don't mean 
to say you're wet? Well, I am surprised. Why; 
it was only my fun." 

They don't give you time to open or shut your 
umbrella in an English April, especially if it is 
an ** automaton" one — ^the umbrella, I mean, 
not the April. 

I bought an *' automaton " once in April, and 
I did have a time with it ! I wanted an umbrella, 
and I went into a shop in the Strand, and told 
them so, and they said : 

''Yes, sir ; what sort of an umbrella would you 
like?" 

I said I should like one that would keep the 
rain off, and that would not allow itself to be left 
behind in a railway carriage. 



On the Weather. 

**Tryan 'automaton,' " said the shopman. 

"What's an ' automaton? ' " said I. 

"Oh, it's a beautiful arrangement," repHed 
the man, with a touch of enthusiasm. " It opens 
and shuts itself." 

I bought one, and found that he was quite 
correct. It did open and shut itself. I had no 
control over it whatever. When it began to rain, 
which it did, that season, every alternate five 
minutes, I used to try and get the machine to 
open, but it would not budge ; and then I used to 
stand and struggle with the wretched thing, and 
shake it, and swear at it, while the rain poured 
down in torrents. Then the moment the rain 
ceased, the absurd thing would go up suddenly 
with a jerk, and would not come down again; 
and I had to walk about under a bright blue sky 
with an umbrella over my head, wishing that it 
would come on to rain again, so that it might not 
seem that I was insane. 

When it did shut, it did so unexpectedly, and 
knocked one's hat off. 

I don't know why it should be so, but it is an 

undeniable fact that there is nothing makes a 

man look so supremely ridiculous as losing his 

hat. The feeling of helpless misery that shoots 

90 



On the Weather. 

down one's back on suddenly becoming aware 
that one's head is bare is among the most bitter 
ills that flesh is heir to. And then there is the 
wild chase after it, accompanied by an excitable 
small dog, who thinks it is a game, and in the 
course of which you are certain to upset three or 
four innocent children — to say nothing of their 
mothers — but a fat old gentleman on the top of a 
perambulator, and cannon off a ladies' seminary 
into the arms of a wet sweep. After this, the 
idiotic hilarity of the spectators, and the dis- 
reputable appearance of the hat, when recovered^ 
appear of but minor importance. 

Altogether, what between March winds, April 
showers, and the entire absence of May flowers, 
spring is not a success in cities. It is all very 
well in the country, as I have said ; but in towns 
whose population is anything over ten thousand, 
it most certainly ought to be abolished. In the 
world's grim workshops, it is like the children — • 
out of place. Neither show to advantage amid 
the dust and din. It seems so sad to see the little 
dirt-grimed brats trying to play in the noisy 
courts and muddy streets. Poor little uncared- 
for, unwanted human atoms, they are not chil- 
dren. Children are bright-eyed, chubby and 
91 



On the Weather. 

shy. These are dingy, screeching eh-es, their 
tiny faces seared and withered, their baby laugh- 
ter cracked and hoarse. 

The spring of hfe and the spring of the year 
were alike meant to be cradled in the green lap 
of Nature. To us, in the town, spring brings but 
its cold winds and drizzling rains. We must seek 
it among the leafless woods, and the brambly 
lanes, on the heathy moors, and the great still 
hills, if we want to feel its joyous breath, and 
hear its silent voices. There is a glorious fresh- 
ness in the spring there. The scurrying clouds, 
the open bleakness, the rushing wind, and the 
clear bright air, thrill one with vague energies 
and hopes. Life, like the landscape around us, 
seems bigger, and wider, and freer — a rainbow 
road, leading to unknown ends. Through the 
silvery rents that bar the sky, we seem to catch a 
glimpse of the great hope and grandeur that lies 
around this little throbbing world, and a breath 
of its scent is wafted us on the wings of the wild 
ISIarch wind. 

Strange thoughts we do not understand are 

stirring in our hearts. Voices are calling us to 

some great effort, to some mighty work. But we 

do not comprehend their meaning yet, and the 

92 



On Cats and Dogs. 

hidden echoes within us that would reply are 
struggling, inarticulate, and dumb. 

We stretch our hands like children to the 
light, seeking to grasp we know not what. Our 
thoughts, like the boys' thoughts in the Danish 
song, are very long, long thoughts, and very 
vague : we cannot see their end. 

It must be so. All thoughts that peer outside 
this narrow world can not be else than dim and 
shapeless. The thoughts that we can clearly 
grasp are very little thoughts — that two and two 
make four — that when we are hungry it is plea- 
sant to eat — that honesty is the best policy ; all 
greater thoughts are undefined and vast to our 
poor childish brains. We see but dimly through 
the mists that roll around our time-girt isle of 
life, and only hear the distant surging of the 
great sea beyond. 

# 

ON CATS AND DOGS. 

AIT" HAT I've suffered from them this morning 
' ' no tongue can tell. It began with Gus- 
tavus Adolphus. Gustavus Adolphus (they call 
him ''Gusty" down-stairs for short) is a very 
good sort of dog, when he is in the middle of a 
93 



On Cats and Dogs. 

large field, or on a fairly extensive common, but 
I won't have him in-doors. He means well, but 
this house is not his size. He stretches himself, 
and over go two chairs and a whatnot. He wags 
his tail, and the room looks as if a devastating 
army had marched through it. He breathes, 
and it puts the fire out. 

At dinner-time he creeps in under the table, 
lies there for a while, and then gets up suddenly ; 
the first intimation we have of his movements 
being given by the table, which appears animated 
by a desire to turn somersaults. We all clutch 
at it frantically, and endeavor to maintain it in a 
horizontal position ; whereupon his struggles, he 
being under the impression that some wicked 
conspiracy is being hatched against him, become 
fearful, and the final picture presented is generally 
that of an overturned table and a smashed-up 
dinner, sandwiched between two sprawling layers 
of infuriated men and women. 

He came in this morning in his usual style, 
which he appears to have founded on that of an 
American cyclone, and the first thing he did was 
to sweep my coffee-cup off the table with his tail, 
sending the contents full into the middle of my 
waistcoat. 

94 



On Cats and Dogs. 

I rose from my chair, hurriedly, and remark- 
ing " ," approached him at a rapid rate. He 

preceded me in the direction of the door. At 
the door he met Eliza coming in with eggs. 
Eliza observed, '*Ugh! " and sat down on the 
floor, the eggs took up different positions about 
the carpet, where they spread themselves out, and 
Gustavus Adolphus left the room. I called after 
him, strongly advising him to go straight down- 
stairs, and not let me see him again for the next 
hour or so ; and he, seeming to agree with me, 
dodged the coal-scoop, and went ; while I 
returned, dried myself, and finished breakfast. I 
made sure that he had gone into the yard, but 
when I looked into the passage ten minutes later, 
he was sitting ^t the top of the stairs. I ordered 
him down at once, but he only barked and 
jumped about, so I went to see what was the 
matter. It was Tittums. She was sitting on the 
top stair but one, and wouldn't let him pass. 

Tittums is our kitten. She is about the size of 
a penny roll. Her back was up, and she was 
swearing like a medical student. 

She does swear fearfully. I do a little that 
way myself sometimes, but I am a mere amateur 
compared with her. To tell you the truth — 
95 



On Cats and Dogs. 

mind, this is strictly between ourselves, please — I 
shouldn't like your wife to know I said it, the 
women don't understand these things; but 
between you and me, you know, I think it does 
a man good to swear. Swearing is the safety- 
valve through which the bad temper, that might 
otherwise do serious internal injury to his mental 
mechanism, escapes in harmless vaporing. When 
a man has said : * ' Bless you, my dear, sweet sir. 
What the sun, moon, and stars made you so care- 
less (if I may be permitted the expression) as to 
allow your light and delicate foot to descend 
upon my corn with so much force ! Is it that 
you are physically incapable of comprehending 
the direction in which you are proceeding ? you 
nice, clever young man, you ! " or words to that 
effect, he feels better. Swearing has the same 
soothing effect upon our angry passions that 
smashing the furniture or slamming the doors is 
so well known to exercise ; added to which, it is 
much cheaper. Swearing clears a man out like a 
pen'orth of gunpowder does the wash-house chim- 
ney. An occasional explosion is good for both. 
I rather distrust a man who never swears, or 
savagely kicks the footstool, or pokes the fire with 
unnecessary violence. Without some outlet, the 
96 



On Cats and Dogs. 

anger caused by the ever-occurring troubles of 
life is apt to rankle and fester within. The petty- 
annoyances, instead of being thrown from us, sit 
down beside us, and become a sorrow, and the 
little offense is brooded over till, in the hot-bed 
of rumination, it grows into a great injury, under 
whose poisonous shadow spring up hatred and 
revenge. 

Swearing relieves the feelings, that is what 
swearing does. I explained this to my aunt on 
one occasion, but it didn't answer with her. She 
said I had no business to have such feelings. 

That is what I told Tittums. I told her she 
ought to be ashamed of herself, brought up in a 
Christian family as she was, too. I don't sc^ 
much mind hearing an old cat swear, but I can't 
bear to see a mere kitten give way to it. It 
seems sad in one so young. 

I put Tittums in my pocket, and returned ta 
my desk. I forgot her for the moment, and when 
I looked I found that she had squirmed out of 
my pocket on to the table, and was trying to 
swallow the pen ; then she put her leg into the 
ink-pot and upset it ; then she licked her leg, 
then she swore again — at me this time. 

I put her down on the floor, and there Tim 
7 97 



On Cats and Dogs. 



"began rowing with her. I do wish Tim would 
mind his own business. It was no concern of 
his what she had been doing. Besides, he is not 
a saint himself. He is only a two-year old fox 
terrier, and he interferes with everything, and 
gives himself the airs of a gray-headed Scotch 
colly. 

Tittums's mother has come in, and Tim has 
got his nose scratched, for which I am remarka- 
bly glad. I have put them all three out in the 
passage, where they are fighting at the present 
moment. I'm in a mess with the ink, and in a 
thundering bad temper ; and if anything more in 
the cat or dog line comes fooling about me this 
morning, it had better bring its own funeral con- 
tractor with it. 

Yet, in general, I like cats and dogs very much 
indeed. What jolly chaps they are ! They are 
much superior to human beings as companions. 
They do not quarrel or argue with you. They 
never talk about themselves, but listen to you 
while you talk about yourself, and keep up an 
appearance of being interested in the conversa- 
tion. They never make stupid remarks. They 
never observe to Miss Brown across a dinner- 
table that they always understood she was very 
98 



On Cats and Dogs. 

sweet on Mr. Jones (who has just married Miss 
Robinson). They never mistake your wife's 
cousin for her husband, and fancy that you are 
the father-in-law. And they never ask a young 
author with fourteen tragedies, sixteen comedies, 
seven farces, and a couple of burlesques in his 
desk why he doesn't write a play. 

They never say unkind things. They never 
tell us of our faults, " merely for our own good." 
They do not, at inconvenient moments, mildly 
remind us of our past follies and mistakes. They 
do not say, ^' Oh, yes, a lot of use you are, if you 
are ever really wanted " — sarcastic-like. They 
never infoi"m us, like our inamoratas sometimes 
do, that we are not nearly so nice as we used to 
be. We are always the same to them. 

They are always glad to see us. They are with 
US in all our humors. They are merry when we 
are glad, sober when we feel solemn, and sad 
when we are sorrowful. 

'' Halloo ! happy, and want a lark ! Right you 
are ; I'm your man. Here I am, frisking round 
you, leaping, barking, pirouetting, ready for any 
amount of fun and mischief. Look at my eyes 
if you doubt me. What shall it be ? A romp 
in the drawing-room, and never mind the furni- 
99 



On Cats and Dogs. 

ture, or a scamper in the fresh, cool air, a scud 
across the fields, and down the hill, and won't 
we let old Gaffer Goggles' s geese know what time 
o' day it is, neidier. Whoop ! come along." 

Or you'd like to be quiet and think. Very 
well. Pussy can sit on the arm of the chair and 
purr, and Montmorency will curl himself up on 
the rug, and blink at the fire, yet keeping one 
eye on you the while, in case you are seized with 
any sudden desire in the direction of rats. 

And when we bury our face in our hands and 
wish we had never been born, they don't sit up 
very straight, and observe that we have brought 
it all upon ourselves. They don't even hope it 
will be a warning to us. But they come up 
softly, and shove their heads against us. If it is 
a cat, she stands on your shoulder, rumples your 
hair, and says: '' Lor', I am sorry for you, old 
man," as plain as words can speak ; and if it is a 
dog, he looks up at you with his big, true eyes, 
and says with them : '' Well, you've always got 
me, you know. We'll go through the world 
together, and always stand by each other, won't 
we?" 

He is very imprudent, a dog is. He never 
makes it his business to inquire whether you are 



On Cats and Dogs. 

in the right or in the wrong, never bothers as to 
whether you are going up or down upon life's 
ladder, never asks whether you are rich or poor^, 
silly or wise, sinner or saint. You are his pal. 
That is enough for him, and, come luck or mis- 
fortune, good repute or bad, honor or shame, he 
is going to stick to you, to comfort you, guard 
you and give his life for you, if need be — foolish,,- 
brainless, soulless dog ! 

Ah ! old stanch friend, with your deep, clear 
eyes, and bright, quick glances, that take in all 
one has to say before one has time to speak it, dO' 
you know you are only an animal, and have no» 
mind ? Do you know that that dull-eyed, gin- 
sodden lout, leaning against the post out there is 
immeasurably your intellectual superior ? Do- 
you know that every little-minded, selfish scoun- 
drel who lives by cheating and tricking, who 
never did a gentle deed, or said a kind word,, 
w^lio never had a thought that was not mean andi 
low, or a desire that was not base^ whose every 
action is a fraud, whose every utterance is a lie ; 
do you know that these crawling skulks (and 
tliere are millions of them in the world), do you 
know they are 'all as much superior to you as the 
sun is superior 'to rush-light, you honorable^ 



On Cats and Dogs. 

brave-hearted, unselfish brute? They are men, 
you know, and men are the greatest, and noblest, 
and wisest, and best beings in the whole vast uni- 
verse. Any man will tell you that. 

Yes, poor doggie, you are very stupid, very 
stupid indeed, compared with us clever men, who 
understand all about politics and philosophy, and 
who know everything, in short, except what we 
are, and where we came from, and whither we are 
going, and what everything outside this tiny 
-world and most things in it are. 

Never mind, though, pussy and doggie, we like 
you both all the better for your being stupid. 
We all like stupid things. Men can't bear clever 
women, and a woman's ideal man is some one 
she can call a '' dear old stupid." It is so plea- 
sant to come across people more stupid than our- 
selves. We love them at once for being so. The 
world must be rather' a rough place for clever 
people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for 
themselves they hate each other most cordially. 

But, there ! the clever people are such a very 
insignificant minority that it really doesn't much 
matter if they are unhappy. So long as the 
foolish people can be made comfortable, the 
world, as a whole, will get on tolerably well. 

I02 



On Cats and Dogs. 

Cats have the credit of being more worldly 
wise than dogs— of looking more after their own 
interests, and being less blindly devoted to those 
of their friends. And we men and women are 
naturally shocked at such selfishness. Cats cer- 
tainly do love a family that has a carpet in the 
kitchen more than a family that has not ; and if 
there are many children about, they prefer to 
spend their leisure time next door. But, taken 
altogether, cats are libeled. Make a friend of 
one, and she will stick to you through thick and 
thin. All the cats that I have had have been 
most firm comrades. I had a cat once that used 
to follow me about everywhere, until it even got 
quite embarrassing, and I had to beg her, as a 
personal favor, not to accompany me any further 
down the High Street. She used to sit up for 
me when I w^as late home, and meet me in the 
passage. It made me feel quite like a married 
man, except that she never asked where I had 
been and then didn't believe me when I told 
her. 

Another cat I had used to get drunk regularly 
every day. She would hang about for hours out- 
side the cellar door for the purpose of sneaking 
m on' the first opportunity, and lapping up the 
103 



On Cats and Dogs. 

drippings from the beer cask. I do not mention 
this habit of hers in praise of the species, but 
merely to show how almost human some of them 
are. If the transmigration of souls is a fact, this 
animal was certainly qualifying most rapidly for 
a Christian. For her vanity was only second to 
her love of drink. Whenever she caught a par- 
ticularly big rat, she would bring it up into the 
room where we were all sitting, lay the corpse 
down in the midst of us, and wait to be praised. 
Lord ! how the girls used to scream. 

Poor rats ! They seem only to exist so that 
cats and dogs may gain credit for killing them 
and chemists make a fortune by inventing spe- 
cialties in poison for their destruction. And yet 
there is something fascinating about them. There 
is aweirdness and uncanniness attaching to them. 
They are so cunning and strong, so terrible in 
their numbers, so cruel, so secret. They swarm 
in deserted houses, where the broken casements 
hang rotting to the crumbling walls, and the 
doors swing creaking on their rusty hinges. They 
know the sinking ship, and leave her, no one 
knows how or whither. They whisper to each 
other in their hiding-places how a doom will fall 
upon the Hall, and the great name die forgot- 
104 



On Cats and Dogs. 

ten. They do fearful deeds in ghastly charnel- 
houses. 

No tale of horror is complete without the rats. 
In stories of ghosts and murderers, they scamper 
through the echoing rooms, and the gnawing of 
their teeth is heard behind the wainscot, and 
their gleaming eyes peer through the holes in the 
worm-eaten tapestry, and they scream in shrill, 
unearthly notes in the dead of night, while the 
moaning wind sweeps, sobbing, round the ruined 
turret towers, and passes wailing like a woman 
through the chambers bare and tenantless. 

And dying prisoners, in their loathsome dun- 
geons, see, through the horrid gloom, their small 
red eyes, like glittering coals ; hear, in the death- 
like silence, the rush of their claw-like feet, and 
start up shrieking in the darkness, and watch 
through the awful night. 

I love to read tales about rats. They make my 
flesh creep so. I like that tale of Bishop Hatto 
and the rats. The wicked bishop, you know, 
had ever so much corn stored in his granaries, 
and would not let the starving people touch it, 
but when they prayed to him for food, gathered 
them together in his barn, and then shutting the 
doors on them, set fire to the place and burned 



On Cats and Dogs. 

them all to death. But next day there came 
thousands upon thousands of rats, sent to do judg- 
ment on him. Then Bishop Hatto fled to his 
strong tower that stood in the middle of the 
Rhine, and barred himself in, and fancied he was 
safe. But the rats! they swam the river, they 
gnawed their way through the thick stone walls, 
and ate him alive where he sat. 

" They have whetted their teeth against the stones, 
And now they pick the bishop's bones ; 
They gnawed the flesh from every limb, 
For they were sent to do judgment on him." 

Oh, it's a lovely tale. 

Then there is the story of the Pied Piper of 
Hamelin, how first he piped the rats away, and 
afterward, when the mayor broke faith with him, 
drew all the children along with him and went 
into the mountain. What a curious old legend 
that is ! I wonder what it means, or has it any 
meaning at all ? There seems something strange 
and deep lying hid beneath the rippling rhyme. 
It haunts me, that picture of the quaint, myster- 
ious old piper, piping through Hamelin's narrow- 
streets, and the children following with dancing 
feet and thoughtful, eager faces. The old folks 
io6 



On Cats and Dogs. 

try to stay them, but the children pay no heed. 
They hear the weird, witched music, and must 
follow. The games are left unfinished, and the 
playthings drop from their careless hands. They 
know not whither they are ^hastening. The 
mystic music calls to them, and they follow, 
heedless and unasking where. It stirs and 
vibrates in their hearts, and other sounds grow 
faint. So they wander through Pied Piper streets 
away from Hamelin town. I get thinking some- 
times if the Pied Piper is really dead, or if he 
may not still be roaming up and down our streets 
and lanes, but playing now so softly that only the 
children hear him. Why do the little faces look 
so grave and solemn when they pause awhile from 
romping, and stand, deep wrapped, with strain- 
ing eyes? They only shake their curly heads, 
and dart back, laughing to their playmates when 
we question them. But I fancy myself they 
have been listening to the magic music of the old 
Pied Pilfer, and, perhaps, with those bright eyes 
of theirs, have even seen his odd, fantastic figure 
gliding unnoticed through the whirl and throng. 
Even we grown-up children hear his piping 
now and then. But the yearning notes are very 
far away, and the noisy, blustering world is 
107 



On Cats and Dogs. 



always bellowing so loud it drowns the dream- 
like melody. One day the sweet, sad strains will 
sound out full and clear, and then we, too, shall, 
like the little children, throw our playthings all 
aside, and follow. The loving hands will be 
stretched out to stay us, and the voices we have 
learned to listen for will cry to us to stop. But 
we shall push the fond arms gently back, and pass 
out through the sorrowing house and through the 
open door. For the wild, strange music will be 
ringing in our hearts, and we shall know the 
meaning of its song by then. 

i wish people could love animals without get- 
ting maudlin over them, as so many do. Women 
are the most hardened offenders in such respects, 
but even our intellectual sex often degrade pets 
into nuisances by absurd idolatry. There are the 
gushing young ladies who, having read '■ David 
Copperfield," have thereupon sought out a small, 
long-haired dog of nondescript breed, possessed 
of an irritating habit of criticising a man's 
trousers, and of finally commenting upon the 
same by a sniff, indicative of contempt and dis- 
gust. They talk sweet, girlish prattle to this 
animal (when there is any one near enough to 
overhear them), and they kiss its nose, and put 
1 08 



On Cats and Dogs. 



its unwashed head up against their cheek in a 
most touching manner ; though I have noticed 
that these caresses are principally performed when 
there are young men hanging about. 

Then there are the old ladies who worship a 
fat poodle scant of breath and full of fleas. I 
knew a couple of elderly spinsters once who had 
a sort of German sausage on legs, which they 
called a dog, between them. They used to wash 
its face with warm water every morning. It had 
a mutton cutlet regularly for breakfast ; and on 
Sundays, when one of the ladies went to church, 
the other always stopped at home to keep the dog 
company. 

There are many families where the whole 
interest of life is centered upon the dog. Cats, 
by the way, rarely suffer from excess of adulation. 
A cat possesses a very fair sense of the ridiculous, 
and will put her paw down kindly, but firmly, 
upon any nonsense of this kind. Dogs, however, 
seem to like it. They encourage their owners in 
the tom-foolery, and the consequence is that 
in the circles I am speaking of, what ''dear 
Fido " has done, does do, won't do, will do, can 
do, can't do, was doing, is doing, is going to do, 
shall do, sha'n't do, and is about to be going to 
109 



On Cats and Dogs. 

have done, is the continual theme of discussion 
from morning till night. 

All the conversation, consisting, as it does, of 
the very dregs of imbecility, is addressed to this 
confounded animal. The family sit in a row all 
day long, watching him, commenting upon his 
actions, telling each other anecdotes about him, 
recalling his virtues, and remembering with tears 
how one day they lost him for two whole hours, 
on which occasion he was brought home in a 
most brutal manner by the butcher boy, v.ho had 
been met carrying him by the scruff of his neck 
with one hand while soundly cuffing his head 
with the other. 

After recovering from these bitter recollections, 
they vie with each other in bursts of admiration 
for the brute, until some more than iisually 
enthusiastic member, unable any longer to con- 
trol his feelings, swoops down upon the unhappy 
quadruped in a frenzy of affection, clutches it 
to his heart, and slobbers over it. Whereupon, 
the others, mad with envy, rise up, and, seizing 
as much of the dog as the greed of the first one 
has left to them, murmur praise and devotion. 

Among these people, everything is done through 
the dog. If you want to make love to the eldest 
no 



On Cats and Dogs. 

daughter, or get the old man to lend you the 
garden roller, or the mother to subscribe to the 
Society for the Suppression of Solo-cornet Players 
in Theatrical Orchestras (it's a pity there isn't 
one, anyhow), you have to begin with the dog. 
You must gain its approbation before they will 
even listen to you, and if, as is highly probable, 
the animal, whose frank, doggie nature has been 
warped by the unnatural treatment he has received, 
responds to your overtures of friendship by vic- 
iously snapping at you, your cause is lost forever. 

''If Fido won't take to any one," the father 
has thoughtfully remarked beforehand, '' I say 
that man is not to be trusted. You know, 
Maria, how often I have said that. Ah, he 
knows, bless him ! ' ' 

Drat him ! 

And to think that the surly brute was once an 
innocent puppy, all legs and head, full of fun 
and play, and burning with ambition to become 
a big, good dog, and bark like mother. 

Ah, me ! life sadly changes us all. The world 
seems a vast, horrible grinding machine, into 
which what is fresh and bright and pure is pushed 
at one end, to come out old and crabbed and 
wrinkled at the other. 

Ill 



On Cats and Dogs. 

Look even at Pussy Sobersides, Avith her dull, 
-sleepy glance, her grave, slow walk, and digni- 
fied, i^rudish airs ; who could ever think that 
once she was the blue-eyed, whirling, scamper- 
ing, head-over-heels, mad little fire-work that we 
call a kitten. 

^Vhat marvelous vitality a kitten has ! It is 
really something very beautiful the way life bub- 
bles over in the little creatures. They rush about, 
and mew, and s])ring ; dance on their hind legs, 
embrace everything with their front ones, roll 
over and over and over, lie on their backs and 
kick. They don't know what to do with them- 
selves, they are so full of life. 

Can you remember, reader, when you and I 
felt something of the same sort of thing ? Can 
you remember those glorious days of fresh young 
manhood ; how, when coming home along the 
moonlit road, we felt too full of life for sober 
walking, and had to spring and skip, and wave 
our arms, and shout, till belated farmers' wives 
thouglit — and with good reason, too — that we 
were mad, and kept close to the hedge, while we 
stood and laughed aloud to see them scuttle off 
so fast, and made their blood run cold with a 
wild parting whoop; and the tears came, we 

112 



On Being Shy. 

kne^y not why. Oh, that magnificent young 
Life ! that crowned us kings of the earth ; that 
rushed through every tingling vein, till we seemed 
to walk on air ; that thrilled through our throb- 
bing brains, and told us to go forth and conquer 
the whole world ; that welled up in our young 
hearts; till we longed to stretch out our arms 
and gather all the toiling men and women and 
the little children to our breasts, and love them 
all — all. Ah ! they were grand days, those deep, 
full days, when our coming life, like an unseen 
organ, pealed strange, yearn ful music in our ears, 
and our young blood cried out like a war-horse 
for the battle. Ah, our pulse beats slow and 
steady now, and our old joints are rheumatic, 
and we love our easy-chair and pipe, and sneer 
at boys' enthusiasm. But, oh ! for one brief 
moment of that god-like life again. 



ON BEING SHY. 

A LL great literary men are shy. I am myself, 
■**- though I am told it is hardly noticeable. 

I am glad it is not. It used to be extremely 
prominent at one time, and was the cause of 
much misery to myself, and discomfort to every 
8 113 



On Being Shy. 

one about me — my lady friends, especially, com- 
plained most bitterly about it. 

A shy man's lot is not a happy one. The men 
dislike him, the women despise him, and he dis- 
likes and despises himself. Use brings him no 
relief, and there is no cure for him except time ; 
though I once came across a delicious receipt 
for overcoming the misfortune. It appeared 
among the ''Answers to Correspondents" in a 
small weekly journal, and ran as follows — I have 
never forgotten it: '' Adopt an easy and pleasing 
manner, especially toward ladies." 

Poor wretch ! I can imagine the grin with 
which he must have read that advice. ''Adopt 
an easy and pleasing manner, especially toward 
ladies," forsooth ! Don't you adopt anything of 
the kind, my dear young shy friend. Your 
attempt to put on any other disposition than your 
own will infallibly result in your becoming ridic- 
ulously gushing and offensively familiar. Be 
your own natural self, and then you will only be 
thought to be surly and stupid. 

The shy man does have some slight revenge 

upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. 

He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate 

his misery. He frightens other people as muck 

114 



On Being Shy. 

as they frighten him. He acts hke a damper 
upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits 
become, in his presence, dej^ressed and nervous. 

This is a good deal brought about by misun- 
derstanding. Many people mistake the shy man's 
timidity for overbearing arrogance, and are awed 
and insulted by it. His awkwardness is resented 
as insolent carelessness, and when, terror-stricken 
at the first word addressed to him, the blood 
rushes to his head, and the power of speech com- 
pletely fails him, he is regarded as an awful ex- 
ample of the evil effects of giving way to passion. 

But, indeed, to be misunderstood is the shy 
man's fate on every occasion ; and, whatever 
impression he endeavors to create, he is sure to 
convey its opposite. When he makes a joke, it 
is looked upon as a pretended relation of fact, 
and his want of veracity much condemned. His 
sarcasm is accepted as his literal opinion, and 
gains for him the reputation of being an ass; 
while if, on the other hand, wishing to ingratiate 
himself, he ventures upon a little bit of flattery, 
it is taken for satire, and he is hated ever after- 
ward. 

These, and the rest of a shy man's troubles, 
are always very amusing, to other people, and 
115 



On Being Shy. 

have offered material for comic writing fronr 
time immemorial. But if we look a little deeper, 
we shall find there is a pathetic, one might 
almost say a tragic, side to tlie picture. A shy 
man means a lonely man — a man cut off from all 
companionship, all sociability. He moves about 
the world, but does not mix with it. Between 
him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impas- 
sable barrier — a strong, invisible wall, that, try- 
ing in vain to scale, he but bruises himself 
against. He sees the pleasant faces and hears 
the pleasant voices on the other side, but he can 
not stretch his hand across to grasp another hand. 
He stands watching the merry groups, and he 
longs to speak, and to claim kindred with them. 
But they pass him by, chatting gayly to one 
another, and he can not stay them. He 'tries to 
reach them, but his prison walls move with him, 
and hem him in on every side. In the busy 
street, in the crowded room, in the grind of work, 
in the whirl of pleasure, amid the many or amid 
the few; wherever men congregate together, 
wherever the music of human speech is heard, 
and human thought is flashed from human eyes, 
there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a 
leper, stands apart. His soul is full of love and 
ii6 



On Being Shy. 

longing, but the world knows it not. The iron 
mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and 
the man beneath is never seen. Genial words; 
and hearty greetings are ever rising to his lips, 
but they die away in unheard whispers behind, 
the steel clamps. His heart aches for the weary 
brother, but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt 
and indignation against wrong choke up his 
throat, and, finding no safety-valve, when in 
passionate utterance they may burst forth, they 
only turn in again and harm him. All the hate, 
and scorn, and love of a deep nature, such as the 
shy man is ever cursed by, fester and corrupt 
within, instead of spending themselves abroad, 
and sour him into a misanthrope and cynic. 

Yes, shy men, like ugly women, have a bad 
time of it in this world, to go through which, 
with any comfort, needs the hide of a rhinoceros. 
Thick skin is, indeed^ our moral clothes, and 
without it we are not fit to be seen about in 
civilized society. A poor gasping, blushing 
creature, with trembling knees and twitching 
hands, is a painful sight to every one, and if it 
can not cure itself, the sooner it goes and hangs 
itself the better. 

The disease can be cured. For the comfort of 
117 



On Being Shy. 

the shy^ I can assure them of that from personal 
experience. I do not like speaking about my- 
self, as may have been noticed, but in the cause 
of humanity, I, on this occasion, will do so, and 
will confess that at one time I was, as the young 
man in one of the ''Bab Ballads" says, "the 
shyest of the shy," and ''whenever I was intro- 
duced to any pretty maid, my knees they knocked 
together just as if I was afraid." Now, I would 
— nay, have — on the very day before yesterday 
I did the deed. Alone and entirely by myself 
(as the school-boy said in translating the " Bel- 
lum Gallicum ") did I beard a railway refresh- 
ment-room young lady in her own lair. I 
rebuked her, in terms of mingled bitterness and 
sorrow, for her callousness and want of condescen- 
sion. I insisted courteously, but firmly, on being 
accorded that deference and attention that was the 
right of the traveling Briton ; and, in the end, / 
iooked her full in the face I Need I say more ? 
True, that immediately after doing so, I left 
the room, with what may possibly have appeared 
to be precipitation, and without waiting for any 
refreshment. But that was because I had changed 
my mind, and not because I was frightened, you 
understand. 

ii8 



On Being Shy. 

One consolation that shy folk can take unto 
themselves is that shyness is certainly no sign of 
■stupidity. It is easy enough for bull-headed 
clowns to sneer at nerves, but the highest natures 
are not necessarily those containing the greatest 
amount of moral brass. The horse is not an 
inferior animal to -the cock-sparrow, nor the deer 
of the forest to the pig. Shyness simply means 
extreme sensibility, and has nothing whatever to 
do with self-consciousness, or with conceit, 
though its relationship to both is continually 
insisted upon by the poll-parrot school of philo- 
sophy. 

Conceit, indeed, is the quickest cure for it. 
When it once begins to dawn upon you that you 
are a good deal cleverer than any one else in 
this world, bashfulness becomes shocked, and 
leaves you. When you can look round a room- 
ful of people, and think that each one is a mere 
child in intellect compared with yourself, you 
feel no more shy of them than you would of a 
select company of magpies or orang-outangs. 

Conceit is the finest armor that a man can 

wear. Upon its smooth, impenetrable surface 

the puny dagger-thrusts of spite and envy glance 

harmlessly aside. Without that breast-plate, the 

119 



On Being Shy. 

sword of talent can not force its way through the 
battle of life, for blows have to be borne as well 
as dealt. I do not, of course, speak of the 
conceit that displays itself in an elevated nose 
and a falsetto voice. That is not real conceit ; 
that is only playing at being conceited, like chil- 
dren play at being kings and queens, and go 
strutting about with feathers and long trains. 
Genuine conceit does not make a man objection- 
able. On the contrary, it tends to make him 
genial, kind-hearted, and simple. He has nO' 
need of affectation ; he is far too well satisfied 
with his own character; and his pride is too 
deeply seated to appear at all on the outside. 
Careless alike of praise or blame, he can afford to 
be truthful. Too far, in fancy, above the rest of 
mankind to trouble about their petty distinctions, 
he is equally at home with duke or costermonger. 
And, valuing no one's standard but his own, he 
is never tempted to practice that miserable pre- 
tense that less self-reliant people offer up as an 
hourly sacrifice to the god of their neighbor's 
opinion. 

The shy man, on the other hand, is humble — 
modest of his own judgment, and over-anxious 
concerning that of others. But this, in the case of 
1 20 



On Being Shy. 

•a young man, is surely right enough. His char- 
acter is unformed. It is slowly evolving itself 
out of a chaos of doubt and disbelief. Before 
the growing insight and experience the diffidence 
recedes. A man rarely carries his shyness past 
the hobble-dehoy period. Even if his own 
inward strength does not throw it off, the rub- 
bings of the world generally smooth it down. 
You scarcely ever meet a really shy man — except 
in novels or on the stage, where, by the by, he 
is much admired, especially by the women. 

There, in that supernatural land; he appears as 
a fair-haired and saint-like young man — fair hair 
and goodness always go together on the stage. 
No respectable audience would believe in one 
without the other. I knew an actor who mislaid 
his wig once, and had to rush on to play the hero 
in his own hair, which was jet black, and the gab ^ 
lery howled at all his noble sentiments under the 
impression that he was the villain. He— the shy 
young man — loves the heroine, oh, so devotedly 
(but only in asides, for he dare not tell her of it), 
and he is so noble and unselfish, and speaks in 
.such a low voice, and is so good to his mother ; 
and the bad people in the play, they laugh at 
ihim, and jeer at him, but he takes it all so gently, 



On Being Shy. 

and, in the end, it transpires that he is such 
a clever man, though nobody knew it, and then 
the heroine tells him she loves him, and he is so 
surprised, and oh, so happy! and everybody 
loves him, and asks him to forgive them, which 
he does in a few well-chosen and sarcastic words, 
and blesses them ; and he seems to have gener- 
ally such a good time of it that all the young 
fellows who are not shy long to be shy. But the 
really shy man knows better. He knows that it 
is not quite so pleasant in reality. He is not 
quite so interesting there as in the fiction. He 
is a little more clumsy and stupid, and a lit- 
tle less devoted and gentle, and his hair is much- 
darker, which, taken altogether, considerably 
alters the aspect of the case. 

The point where he does resemble his ideal is- 
^m his faithfulness. I am fully prepared to allow 
the shy young man that virtue : he is constant in 
his love. But the reason is not far to seek. The 
fact is, it exhausts all his stock of courage to look 
one woman in the face, and it would be simply 
impossible for him to go through the ordeal with 
a second. He stands in far too much dread of the 
whole female sex to want to go gadding about, 
with many of them. One is quite enough for him.. 



On Being Shy. 

Now, it is different with the young man who 
is not shy. He has temptations which his bash- 
ful brother never encounters. He looks around, 
and everywhere sees roguish eyes and laughing 
lips. What more natural than that amid so many 
roguish eyes and laughing lips he should become 
confused, and, forgetting for the moment which 
particular pair of roguish eyes and laughing lips 
it is that he belongs to, go off making love to 
the wrong set-! The shy man, who never looks 
at anything but his own boots, sees not, and is 
not tempted. Happy shy man ! 

Not but what the shy man himself would much 
rather not be happy in that way. He longs to 
*'go it" with the others, and curses himself 
every day for not being able to. He will, now 
and again, screwing up his courage by a tre- 
mendous effort, plunge into roguishness. But it is 
always a terrible fiasco, and after one or two feeble 
flounders, he crawls out again, limp and pitiable. 

I say ''pitiable," though I am afraid he is 
never pitied. There are certain misfortunes 
which, while inflicting a vast amount of suffering 
upon their victims, gain for them no sympathy. 
Losing an umbrella, falling in love, toothache, 
black eyes, and having your hat sat upon, may 
123 



On Being Shy. 

be mentioned as a few examples, but the chief 
of them all is shyness. The shy man is regarded 
as an animate joke. His tortures are the sport of 
the drawing-room arena, and are pointed out 
and discussed with much gusto. 

''Look," cry his tittering audience to each 
other, " he's blushing ! " 

''Just watch his legs," says one. 

"Do you notice how he is sitting?" adds 
another; " right on the edge of the chair." 

^' Seems to have plenty of color," sneers a 
military-looking gentleman. 

"Pity he's got so many hands," murmurs an 
elderly lady, with her own calmly folded on her 
lap. " They quite confuse him." 

" A yard or two off his feet wouldn't be a dis- 
advantage," chimes in the comic man, "espe- 
cially as he seems so anxious to hide them." 

And then another suggests that with such a 
voice he ought to have been a sea-captain. Some 
draw attention to the desperate way in which he 
is grasping his hat. Some comment upon his 
limited powers of conversation. Others remark 
upon the troublesome nature of his cough. And 
so on, until his peculiarities and the company are 
both thoroughly exhausted. 
124 




Idle Thoughts. P- ^24. 

"HIS TORTURES ARE THE SPORT O^ ^HE DRAWING ROOM ARENA." 



On Being Shy. 

His friends and relations make matters still 
more unpleasant for the poor boy. (Friends and 
relations are privileged to be more disagreeable 
than other people.) Not content with making 
fun of him among themselves, they insist on his 
seeing the joke. They mimic and caricature him 
for his own edification. One, pretending to imi- 
tate him, goes outside, and comes in again in a 
ludicrously nervous manner, explaining to him 
afterward that that is the way he — meaning the 
shy fellow — Avalks into a room ; or, turning to 
him with " This is the way you shake hands," 
proceeds to go through a comic pantomime with 
the rest of the room, taking hold of every one's 
hand as if it were a hot plate, and flabbily drop- 
ping it again. And then they ask him why he 
blushes, and why he stammers, and why he always 
speaks in an almost inaudible tone, as if they 
thought he did it on purpose. Then one of 
them, sticking out his chest, and strutting about 
the room like a pouter pigeon, suggests quite 
seriously that that is the style he should adopt. 
The old man slaps him on the back, and says, 
''Be bold, my boy. Don't be afraid of any 
one." The mother says, ''Never do anything 
that you need to be ashamed of, Algernon, and 
125 



On Being, Shy. 

then you never need be ashamed of anything you 
do," and, beaming mildly at him, seems surprised 
at the clearness of her own logic. The boys tell 
him that he's ''worse than a girl," and the girls 
repudiate the implied slur upon their sex by in- 
dignantly exclaiming that they are sure no girl 
would be half as bad 

They are quite right ; no girl would be. There 
is no such thing as a shy woman, or, at all events, 
I have never come across one, and, until I do, 
I shall not believe in them. I know that the 
■generally accepted belief is quite the reverse. 
All women are supposed to be like timid, startled 
fawns, blushing and casting down their gentle 
eyes when looked at, and running away when 
spoken to ; while we men are supposed to be a 
bold and rollicky lot, and the poor, dear little 
women admire us for it, but are terribly afraid of 
us. It is a pretty theory, but, like most generally 
accepted theories, mere nonsense. The girl of 
twelve is self-contained, and as cool as the 
proverbial cucumber, while her brother of 
twenty stammers and stutters by her side. A 
woman will enter a concert-room late, interrupt 
the performance and disturb the whole audi- 
ence without moving a hair, while her hus- 
126 



On Babies. 

band follows her, a crushed heap of apologizing 
misery. 

The superior nerve of women in all matters 
connected with love, from the casting of the first 
sheep's eye down to the end of the honey-moon, 
is too well acknowledged to need comment. Nor 
is the example a fair one to cite in the present in- 
stance, the positions not being equally balanced. 
Love is woman's business, and in ''business" we 
all lay aside our natural weaknesses. The shyest 
man I ever knew was a photographic tout. 



ON BABIES. 

/^H, yes, I do — I know a lot about 'em. I 
^^ was one myself once — though not long, not 
so long as my clothes. T/iey were very long, I 
recollect, and always in my way when I wanted 
to kick. Why do babies have such yards of un- 
necessary clothing ? It is not a riddle. I really 
want to know. I never could understand it. Is 
it that the parents are ashamed of the size of the 
child, and wish to make believe that it is longer 
than it actually is ? I asked a nurse once why 
it was. She said : 

127 



On Babies. 

^' Lor', sir, they always have long clothes, bless 
their little hearts." 

And when I explained that her answer, although 
doing credit to her feelings, hardly disposed of 
my difficulty, she replied : 

"Lor', sir, you wouldn't have 'em in short 
clothes, poor httle dears?" And she said it in a 
tone that seemed to imply I had suggested some 
unmanly outrage. 

Since then I have felt shy at making inquiries 
on the subject, and the reason — if reason there 
be — is still a mystery to me. But, indeed, put- 
ting them in any clothes at all seems absurd to 
my mind. Goodness knows, there is enough of 
dressing and undressing to be gone through in 
life, without beginning it before we need ; and 
•one would think that people who live in bed 
might, at all events, be spared the torture. Why 
wake the poor little wretches up in the morning 
to take one lot of clothes off, fix another lot on, 
and put them to bed again ; and then, at night, 
haul them out once more, merely to change 
everything back? And when all is done, what 
difference is there, I should like to know, between 
•a baby's night-shirt and the thing it wears in the 
<i ay-time ? 

128 



On Babies. 

Very likely, however, I am only making myself 
ridiculous — I often do, so I am informed — and I 
will, therefore, say no more upon this matter of 
clothes, excej^t only that it would be of great con- 
venience if some fashion were adopted enabling 
you to tell a boy from a girl. 

At present it is most awkward. Neither hair, 
dress, nor conversation affords the slightest clew, 
and you are left to guess. By some mysterious 
law of Nature, you invariably guess Avrong, and 
are thereupon regarded by all relatives and friends 
as a mixture of fool and knave, the enormity of 
alluding to a male babe as ''she" being only 
equaled by the atrocity of referring to a female 
infant as "he." Whichever sex the particular 
child in question happens not to belong to is con- 
sidered as beneath contempt, and any mention of 
it is taken as a personal insult to the family. 

And, as you value your fair name, do not 
attempt to get out of the difficulty by talking of 
"it." There are various methods by which you 
may achieve ignominy and shame. By murder- 
ing a large and respected family in cold blood, 
and afterward depositing their bodies in the water 
companies' reservoir, you will gain much unpopu- 
larity in the neighborhood of your crime, and 
9 129 



On Babies. 

even robbing a church will get you cordially dis- 
liked, especially by the vicar. But if you desire 
to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and 
hatred that a fellow human creature can pour out 
for you, let a young mother hear you call dear 
baby '^ it." 

Your best plan is to address the article as ''lit- 
tle angel." The noun ''angel," being of com- 
mon gender, suits the case admirably, and the 
epithet is sure of being favorably received. 
*' Pet " or "beauty" are useful for variety's 
:sake, but "angel" is the term that brings you 
the greatest credit for sense and good feeling. 
The word should be preceded by a short giggle, 
and accompanied by as much smile as possible. 
And, whatever you do, don't forget to say that 
the child has got its father's nose. This "fetches " 
the parents (if I may be allowed a vulgarism) 
more than anything. They will pretend to laugh 
at the idea at first, and will say: "Oh, non- 
sense !" You must then get excited, and insist 
that it is a fact. You need have no conscientious 
.scruples on the subject, because the thing's nose 
really does resemble its father's — at all events 
-quite as much as its does anything else in nature 
— being, as it is, a mere smudge. 



On Babies. 

Do not despise these hints, my friends. There 
may come a time when, with mamma on one side 
and grandmamma on the other, a group of ad- 
miring young ladies (not admiring you, though) 
behind, and a bald-headed dab of humanity in 
front, you will be extremely thankful for some 
idea of what to say. A man — an unmarried man, 
that is — is never seen to such disadvantage as 
when undergoing the ordeal of ''seeing baby." 
A cold shudder runs down his back at the bare 
proposal, and the sickly smile with which he says 
how delighted he shall be, ought surely to move 
€ven a mother's heart, unless, as I am inclined 
to believe, the w^hole proceeding is a mere device 
adopted by wives to discourage the visits of 
bachelor friends. 

It is a cruel tripk, though, whatever its excuse 
may be. The bell is rung, and somebody sent 
to tell the nurse to bring baby down. This is 
the signal for all the females present to com- 
mence talking ' ' baby, ' ' during which time you 
are left to your own sad thoughts, and to specu- 
lations upon the practicability of suddenly recol- 
lecting an important engagement, and the likeli- 
hood of your being believed if you do. Just 
"when you have concocted an absurdly implausi- 
131 



On Babies. 

"ble tale about a man outside, the door opens, 
and a tall, severe -looking woman enters, carrying 
what at first sight appears to be a particularly 
skinny bolster, with the feathers all at one end. 
Instinct, however, tells you that this is the baby^ 
and you rise with a miserable attempt at ap- 
pearing eager. When the first gush of feminine 
enthusiasm with which the object in question is 
received has died out, and the number of ladies 
talking at once has been reduced to the ordinary 
four or five, the circle of fluttering petticoats 
divides, and room is made for you to step for- 
ward. This you do with much the same air that 
you would walk into the dock at Bow Street, and 
then, feeling unutterably miserable, you stand 
solemnly staring at the child. There is dead 
silence, and you know that e^*ery one is waiting 
for you to speak. You try to think of something 
to say, but find, to your horror, that your reason- 
ing faculties have left you. It is a moment of 
despair, and your evil genius, seizing the oppor- 
tunity, suggests to you some of the most idiotic 
remarks that it is possible for a human being ta 
perpetrate. Glancing round with an imbecile 
smile, you sniggeringly observe that *' It hasn't 
got much hair, has it?" Nobody answers you 
132 



On Babies. 

for a minute, but at last the stately nurse says 
with much gravity: "It is not customary for 
children five weeks old to have long hair." 
Another silence follows this, and you feel you 
are being given a second chance, which you avail 
yourself of by inquiring if it can walk yet, or 
what they feed it on. By this time you have got 
to be regarded as not quite right in your head, 
and pity is the only thing felt for you. The 
nurse, however, is determined that, insane or not, 
there shall be no shirking, and that you shall go 
through your task to the end. In the tones of a 
high priestess, directing some religious mystery, 
she says, holding the bundle toward you, *' Take 
her in your, arms, sir." You are too crushed to 
offer any resistance, and so meekly accept the 
burden. "Put you arm more down her middle, 
sir," says the high priestess, and then all step 
back and watch you intently, as though you were 
going to do a trick with it. 

"What to do you know no more than you did 
what to say. It is certain something must be 
done, however, and the only thing that occurs 
to you is to heave the unhappy infant up and 
down to the accompaniment of " oopsee-daisy," 
or some remark of equal intelligence. "1 
133 



On Babies. 

Avouldn't jig her, sir, if I were you," says the 
nurse; " a very little upsets her." You promptly 
decide not to jig her, and sincerely hope that 
you have not gone too far already. 

At this point the child itself, who has hitherto 
been regarding you with an expression of mingled 
horror and disgust, puts an end to the nonsense 
by beginning to yell at the top of its voice, at 
which the priestess rushes forward and snatches it 
from you w4th, '' There, there, there ! What did 
ums do to urns ? " *' How very extraordinary ! ' ' 
you say, pleasantly. ' ' Whatever made it go off 
like that?" ''Oh, why, you must have done 
something to her ! ' ' says the mother, indignantly ; 
''the child wouldn't scream like that for noth- 
ing." It is evident they think you have been 
Tunning pins into it. 

The brat is calmed at last, and would no doubt 
remain quiet enough, only some mischievous 
busybody points you out again with "Who's this, 
baby?" and the intelligent child, recognizing 
you, howls louder than ever. 

Wliereupon, some fat old lady remarks that 
"It's strange how children take a dislike to any 
one." "Oh, they know," replies another, mys- 
teriously. "It's a wonderful thing," adds a 
134 



On Babies. 

third ; and then somebody looks sideways at you, 
convinced you are a scoundrel of the blackest 
dye ; and they glory in the beautiful idea that 
your true character, unguessed by your fellow- 
men, has been discovered by the untaught in- 
stinct of a little child. 

Babies, though, with all their crimes and errors, 
are not without their use — not without use, surely, 
when they fill an empty heart ; not without use 
when, at their call, sunbeams of love break 
through care-clouded faces ; not without use 
when their little fingers press wrinkles into smiles. 

Odd little people ! They are the unconscious 
comedians of the world's great stage. They sup- 
ply the humor in life's all too heavy drama. Each 
one, a small but determined opposition to the 
order of things in general, is forever doing the 
wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong 
place, and in the wrong way. The nurse-girl, 
who sent Jenny to see what Tommy and Totty 
were doing, and "tell 'em they mustn't," knew 
infantile nature. Give an average baby a fair 
chance, and if it doesn't do something it oughtn't 
to, a doctor should be called in at once. 

They have a genius for doing the most ridicu- 
lous things, and they do them in a grave, stoical 
135 



On Babies. 

manner that is irresistible. The business-like air 
with which two of them will join hands and pro- 
ceed due east at a break-neck toddle, while an 
excitable big sister is roaring for them to follow 
her in a westerly direction, is most amusing — ex- 
cept, perhaps, for the big sister. They walk 
round a soldier, staring at his legs with the great- 
est curiosity, and poke him to see if he is real. 
They stoutly maintain, against all argument, and 
much to the discomfort of the victim, that the 
bashful young man at the end of the 'bus is. 
"dadda." A crowded street corner suggests. 
itself to their minds as a favorable spot for the 
discussion of family affairs at a shrill treble. 
When in the middle of crossing the road, they 
are seized with a sudden impulse to dance, and 
the doorstep of a busy shop is the place they 
always select for sitting down and taking off their 
shoes. 

When at home they find the biggest walking- 
stick in the house, or an umbrella — open preferred 
— of much assistance in getting upstairs. They 
discover that they love Mary Ann at the precise 
moment when that faithful domestic is black- 
leading the stove, and nothing will relieve their 
feelings but to embrace her then and there. 
136 



On Babies. 

With regard to food, their favorite dishes are 
€oke and cats' meat. They nurse pussy upside 
down, and they show their affection for the dog 
by pulUng his tail. 

They are a deal of trouble, and they make a 
place untidy, and they cost a lot of money to 
keep ; but still you would not have the house 
without them. It would not be home without 
their noisy tongues and their mischief-making 
hands. Would not the rooms seem silent with- 
out their pattering feet, and might not you stray 
apart if no prattling voices called you together. 

It should be so, and yet I have sometimes 
thought the tiny hand seemed as a wedge, divi- 
ding. It is a bearish task to quarrel with that 
purest of all human affections — that perfecting 
touch to a woman's life — a mother's love. It is 
a holy love, that we coarser-fibered men can 
hardly understand, and I would not be deemed 
to lack reverence for it when I say that surely it 
need not swallow up all other affection. The 
baby need not take your whole heart, like the 
rich man who walled up the desert well. Is there 
not another thirsty traveler standing by ? 

Do not, in your desire to be a good mother, 
forget to be a good wife. No need for all the 
137 



On Babies. 

thought and care to be only for one. Do not, 
whenever poor Edwin wants you to come out, 
answer indignantly, "What and leave baby?" 
Do not spend all your evenings upstairs, and do 
not confine your conversation exclusively to 
whooping-cough and measles. My dear little 
woman, the child is not going to die every time 
it sneezes, the house is not bound to get burned 
down, and the nurse run away with a soldier 
every time you go outside the front door; nor 
the cat sure to come and sit on the precious 
child's chest the moment you leave the bedside. 
You worry yourself a good deal too much about 
that solitary chick, and you worry everybody 
else, too. Try and think of your other duties, 
and your pretty face will not be always puckered 
into wrinkles, and there will be cheerfulness in 
the parlor as well as in the nursery. Think of 
your big baby a little. Dance him about a bit ; 
call him pretty names; laugh at him now and 
then. It is only the first baby that takes up the 
whole of a woman's time. Five or six do not 
require nearly so much attention as one. But 
before then the mischief has been done. A house 
where there seems no room for him, and a w^ife 
too busy to think of him, have lost their hold on 



On Babies. 

that so unreasonable husband of yours, and he 
has learned to look elsewhere for comfort and 
companionship. 

But there, there, there ! I shall get myself the 
character of ^ baby hater if I talk any more in 
this strain. And Heaven knows I am not one. 
Who could be, to look into the little innocent 
faces clustered in timid helplessness round those 
great gates that open down into the world ? 

The world ! the small round world ! what a 
vast, mysterious place it must seem to baby eyes ! 
What a trackless continent the back garden 
appears ! What marvelous explorations they 
make in the cellar under the stairs ! With what 
awe they gaze down the long street, wondering, 
like us bigger babies, when we gaze up at the 
stars, where it all ends ! 

And down that longest street of all, that long,, 
dim street of life that stretches out before them — 
what grave, old-fashioned looks they seem to 
cast ! What pitiful, frightened looks sometimes ! 
I saw a little mite sitting on a doorstep in a Soho 
slum one night, and I shall never forget the look 
that the gas-lamp showed me on its wizen face — 
a look of dull despair, as if, from the squalid 
court, the vista of its own squalid life had risen, 
139 



On Eating and Drinking. 

ghost-like, and struck its heart dead with hor- 
ror. Poor Uttle feet, just commencing the stony 
journey ! We, old travelers, far down the road, 
can only pause to wave a hand to you. You 
come out of the dark mist, and we, looking back, 
see you, so tiny in the distance, standing on the 
brow of the hill, your arms stretched out toward 
lis. God speed you ! We would stay and take 
your little hands in ours, but the murmur of the 
.great sea is in our ears, and we may not linger. 
We must hasten down, for the shadowy ships are 
waiting to spread their sable sails. 



ON EATING AND DRINKING. 

I ALWAYS was fond of eating and drinking, 
even as a child — especially eating, in those 
early days. I had an appetite then, also a diges- 
tion. I remember a dull-eyed, livid-complex- 
ioned gentleman coming to dine at our house 
■once. He watched me eating for about five min- 
utes, quite fascinated, seemingly, and then he 
turned to my father, with, '' Does your boy ever 
isuffer from dyspepsia ? ' ' 

^'I never heard him complain of anything of 
140 



On Eating and Drinking. 

that kind," replied my father. "Do you ever 
suffer from dyspepsia, Collywobbles ? ' ' (They 
called me Collywobbles, but it was not my real 
name.) 

'' No, pa," I answered. After which, I added, 
■'' What is dyspepsia, pa? " 

My livid-complexioned friend regarded me 
with a look of mingled amazement and envy. 
Then in a tone of infinite pity he slowly said, 
^' You will know — some day." 

My poor, dear mother used to say she liked to 
see me eat, and it has always been a pleasant 
reflection to me since that I must have given her 
much gratification in that direction. A growing, 
healthy lad, taking plenty of exercise, and careful 
to restrain himself from indulging in too much 
study, can generally satisfy the most exacting 
expectations as regards his feeding powers. 

It is amusing to see boys eat, when you have not 
got to pay for it. Their idea of a square meal is 
a pound and a half of roast beef with five or six 
good-sized potatoes (soapy ones preferred, as 
being more substantial), plenty of greens, and 
four thick slices of Yorkshire pudding, followed 
by a couple of currant dumplings, a few green 
apples, and a pen'orth of nuts, half a dozen jum- 
141 



On Eating and Drinking. 

bles, and a bottle of ginger beer. After that the7 
play at horses. 

How they must despise us men, who require to 
sit quiet for a couple of hours after dining off a 
spoonful of clear soup and the wing of a chicken ! 

But the boys have not all the advantages on 
their side. A boy never enjoys the luxury of 
being satisfied. A boy never feels full. He can 
never stretch out his legs, put his hands behind 
his head, and, closing his eyes, sink into the 
ethereal blissfulness that encompasses the well- 
dined man. A dinner makes no difference what- 
ever to a boy. To a man, it is as a good fairy's 
jDotion, and, after it, the world appears a brighter 
and a better place. A man who has dined satis- 
factorily experiences a yearning love toward all 
his fellow-creatures. He strokes the cat quite 
gently, and calls it '' poor pussy," in tones full 
of the tenderest emotion. He sympathizes with 
the members of the German band outside, and 
wonders if they are cold ; and, for the moment,, 
he does not even hate his wife's relations. 

A good dinner brings out all the softer side of 

a man. Under its genial influence, the gloomy 

and morose become jovial and chatty. Sour, 

starchy individuals, who all the rest of the day go 

142 



On Eating and Drinking. 

about looking as if they lived on vinegar and 
Epsom salts, break out into wreathed smiles after 
dinner and exhibit a tendency to pat small chil- 
dren on the head, and to talk to them — vaguely — 
about sixpences. Serious young men thaw, and 
become mildly cheerful ; and snobbish young 
men, of the heavy mustache type, forget to make 
themselves objectionable. 

I always feel sentimental myself after dinner. 
It is the only time when I can properly appreciate 
love stories. Then, when the hero clasps 'Mier" 
to his heart in One last wild embrace, and stifles 
a sob, I feel as sad as though I had dealt at whist 
and turned up only a deuce ; and when the 
heroine dies in the end I weep. If I read the 
same tale early in the morning, I should sneer at 
it. Digestion, or rather indigestion, has a mar- 
velous effect upon the heart. If I want to write 
anything very pathetic — I mean if I want to try 
to write anything very pathetic — I eat a large 
plateful of hot buttered muffins about an hour 
beforehand, and then, by the time I sit down to 
my work, a feeling of unutterable melancholy 
has come over me. I picture heart-broken lovers 
parting forever at lonely way-side stiles, while the 
sad twilight deepens around them, and only the. 
143 



On Eating and Drinking. 

tinkling of a distant sheep-bell breaks the sorrow- 
laden silence. Old men sit and gaze at withered 
fiowsrs till their sight is dimmed by the mist of 
tears. Little dainty maidens wait and watch at 
open casements; but '^ he cometh not," and the 
heavy years roll by, and the sunny gold tresses 
wear white and thin. The babies that they 
dandled have become grown men and women 
with podgy torments of their own, and the play- 
mates that they laughed with are lying very silent 
under the waving grass. But still they wait and 
watch, till the dark shadows of the unknown night 
steal up and gather round them, and the world with 
its childish troubles fades from their aching eyes. 

I see pale corpses tossed on white-foamed waves, 
and death-beds stained with bitter tears, and 
graves in trackless deserts. I hear the wild wail- 
ing of women, the low moaning of the little 
children, the dry sobbing of strong men. It's all 
the muffins. I could not conjure up one melan- 
choly fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of 
champagne. 

A full stomach is a great aid to poetry, and 

indeed no sentiment of any kind can stand upon 

an empty one. We have not time or inclination 

to indulge in fanciful troubles, until we have got 

144 



On Eating and Drinking. 

rid of our real misfortunes. We do not sigh over 
dead dicky-birds with the baiUff in the house ; 
and, when we do not know where on earth to get 
our next shilling from, we do not w^orry whether 
our mistress's smiles are cold, or hot, or luke- 
warm, or anything else about them. 

Foolish people — when I say '^ foolish people " 
in this contemptuous way, I mean people who 
entertain different opinions to mine. If there is 
one person I do despise more than another, it is 
the man who does not think exactly the same on 
all topics as I do. Foolish people, I say, then, 
who have never experienced much of either, will 
tell you that mental distress is far more agonizing 
than bodily. Romantic and touching theory ! so 
comforting to the love-sick young sprig who looks 
down patronizingly at some poor devil with a 
white starved face, and thinks to himself, ''Ah, 
how happy you are compared with me !" so sooth- 
ing to fat old gentlemen who cackle about the 
superiority of poverty over riches. But it is all' 
nonsense — all cant. An aching head soon makes 
one forget an aching heart. A broken finger will 
drive away all recollections of an empty chair. 
And when a man feels really hungry, he does not" 
feel anything else. 

lo 145 



On Eating and Drinking. 

We sleek, well-fed folk can hardly realize what 
feeling hungry is like. We know what it is to 
have no appetite, and not to care for the dainty 
victuals placed before us ; but we do not under- 
stand what it means to sicken for food — to die for' 
bread while others waste it — to gaze with famished 
eyes upon coarse fare steaming behind dingy win- 
dows, longing for a pen'orth of pease pudding, 
and not having the penny to buy it — to feel that 
a crust would be delicious, and that a bone would 
be a banquet. 

Hunger is a luxury to us, a piquant, flavor- 
giving sauce. It is well worth while to get 
hungry and thirsty, merely to discover how much 
gratification can be obtained from eating and 
drinking. If you wish to thoroughly enjoy your 
dinner, take a thirty-mile country w^alk after 
breakfast, and don't touch anything till you get 
back. How" yqpr eyes will glisten at sight of the 
white table-cloth and steaming dishes then ! 
With what a sigh of content you will put down 
the empty beer tankard, and take up your knife 
and fork ! And how comfortable you feel after- 
w^ard, as you push back your chair, light a cigar, 
and beam round upon everybody. 

Make sure, however, when adopting this plan, 
146 



On Eating and Drinking. 

that the good dinner is really to be had at the 
end, or the disappointment is trying. I remem- 
ber once a friend and I — dear old Joe, it was. 
Ah ! how we lose one another in life's mist. It 
.must be eight years since I last saw Joseph 
Taboys. How pleasant it would be to meet his 
jovial face again, to clasp his strong hand, and to 
hear his cheery laugh once more ! He owes me 
fourteen shillings, too. Well, we were on a holi- 
day together, and one morning we had breakfast 
€arly, and started for a tremendously long walk. 
We had ordered a duck for dinner overnicrht. 

o 

We said, " Get a big one, because we shall come 
home awfully hungry;" and as we were going 
•out our landlady came up in great spirits. She 
said, " I have got you gentlemen a duck, if you 
like. If you get through that, you'll do well;" 
and she held up a bird about the size of a door- 
mat. We chuckled at the sight, and said we 
would try. We said it with self-conscious pride, 
like men who know their own power. Then we 
started. 

We lost our v/ay, of course. I always do in 
the country, and it does make me so wild, be- 
cause it is no use asking directions of any of the 
people you meet. One might as well inquire of 
147 



On Eating and Drinking. 

a lodging-house slavey the way to make beds, as 
expect a country bumpkin to know the road to 
the next village. You have to shout the question 
about three times before the sound of your voice 
penetrates his skull. At the third time, he slowly 
raises his head, and stares blankly at you. Yon 
yell it at him then for the fourth time, and he 
repeats it after you. He ponders while you could 
count a couple of hundred, after which, speaking 
at the rate of three words a minute, he fancies. 
you '^ couldn't do better than — " Here he 
catches sight of another idiot coming down the 
road, and bawls out to him the particulars, re- 
questing his advice. The two then argue the 
case for a quarter of an hour or so, and finally 
agree that you had better go straight down the 
lane, round to the right, and cross by the third 
stile, and keep to the left by old Jimmy Milcher's; 
cow-shed and across the seven-acre field, and 
through the gate by 'Squire Grubbin's hay-stack, 
keeping the bridle-path for a while, till you come 
opposite the hill where the wind-mill used to be 
— but it's gone now — and round to the right, 
leaving Stiggin's plantation behind you; and you 
say " Thank you," and go away with a splitting 
headache, but without the faintest notion of your 
148 



On Eating and Drinking. 

way, the only clear idea you have on the subject 
being that somewhere or other there is a stile 
which has to be got over; and at the next turn^ 
you come upon four stiles, all leading in different 
directions ! 

AVe had undergone this ordeal two or three 
times. We had tramped over fields. We had 
waded through brooks, and scrambled over hedges- 
and walls. We had had a row as to whose fault 
it was that we had first lost our way. We had 
got thoroughly disagreeable, foot-sore, and weary.. 
But, throughout it all, the hope of that duck 
kept us up. A fairy-like vision, it floated before 
cur tired eyes, and drew us onward. 

The thought of it was as a trumpet-call to the 
fainting. We talked of it, and cheered each 
other with our recollections of it. " Come 
along," we said, '' the duck will be spoiled." 

We felt a strong temptation, at one point, to 
turn into a village inn as we passed, and have a 
cheese and a few loaves between us; but we 
heroically restrained ourselves : we should enjoy 
the duck all the better for being famished. 

W^e fancied we smelled it when we got into the 
town, and did the last quarter of a mile in three 
minutes. We rushed upstairs and washed our- 
149 



On Eating and Drinking. 

selves, and changed our clothes, and came down, 
and pulled our chairs up to the table, and sat and 
rubbed our hands while the landlady removed 
the covers, when I seized the knife and fork and 
started to carve. 

It seemed to want a lot of carving. I struggled 
with it for about five minutes without making the 
slightest impression, and then Joe, who had been 
•eating potatoes, wanted to know if it wouldn't be 
better for some one to do the job that understood 
carving. I took no notice of his foolish remark, 
but attacked the bird again, and so vigorously 
this time, that the animal left the dish, and took 
refuge in the fender. 

We soon had it out of that, though, and I was 
prepared to make another effort. But Joe was 
getting unpleasant. He said that if he had thought 
we were to have a game of blind hookey with the 
dinner, he would have got a bit of bread and 
cheese outside. 

I was too exhausted to argue. 1 laid down the 
knife and fork with dignity, and took a side seat ', 
and Joe went for the wretched creature. He 
worked away, in silence for awhile, and then 
he muttered: '' Damn the duck ! " and took his 
coat off. 

150 



On Eating and Drinking. 

We did break the thing up at length, with the 
aid of a chisel ; but it was perfectly impossible 
to eat it, and we had to make a dinner off the 
A^egetables and an apple tart. We tried a mouth- 
ful of the duck, but it was like eating India- 
rubber. 

It was a wicked sin to kill that drake. But 
there ! there's no respect for old institutions in 
this country. 

I started this paper with the idea of writing about 
eating and drinking, but I seem to have confined 
my remarks entirely to eating as yet. Well, you 
see, drinking is one of those subjects with which 
it is unadvisable to appear too well acquainted. 
The days are gone by when it was considered 
manly to go to bed intoxicated every night, and 
a clear head and a firm hand no longer draw 
down upon their owner the reproach of effemi- 
nacy. On the contrary, in these sadly degen- 
erate days, an evil-smelling breath, a blotchy face, 
a reeling gait, and a husky voice are regarded as 
the hall-marks of the cad rather than of the gen- 
tleman. 

Even nowadays, though, the thirstiness of 
mankind is something supernatural. We are 
forever drinking on one excuse or another. A 
151 



On Eating and Drinking-. 

man never feels comfortable unless he has a glass 
before him. We drink before meals, and with 
mealS; and after meals. We drink when we meet 
a friend, also when we part from a friend. We 
drink when we are talking, when we are reading, 
and when we are thinking. We drink one 
another's health, and spoil our own. We drink 
the Queen, and the Army, and the Ladies, and 
everybody else that is drinkable; and I believe, 
if the supply ran short, we should drink our 
mothers-in-law. 

By the way, we never eat anybody's health, 
always drink it. AVhy should we not stand up 
now and then and eat a tart to somebody's 
success ? 

To me, I confess, the constant necessity of 
drinking under which the majority of men labor 
is quite unaccountable. I can understand people 
drinking to drown care, or to drive away mad- 
dening thoughts, well enough. I can undersSbd 
the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in 
drink — oh, yes, it's very shocking that they 
should, of course — very shocking to us who live 
in cosy homes, with all the graces and pleasures 
of life around us, that the dwellers in damp 
cellars and windy attics should creep from their 
152 



On Eating and Drinking. 

dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the 
public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief 
space away from their dull world upon a Lethe 
stream of gin. 

But think, before you hold up your hands in 
horror at their ill-living, what ''life" for these 
wretched creatures really means. Picture the 
squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged 
on from year to year in the narrow, noisome 
Toom where, huddled like vermin in the sewers, 
they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt- 
grimed children scream and fight, and sluttish, 
shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; 
where the street outside teems with roaring filth, 
and the house around is a bedlam of riot and 
stench. 

Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of 
life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. 
The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay, and 
il^nches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch- 
dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, 
dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, 
and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a 
caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these 
human logs never knows one ray of light. From 
the hour when they crawl from their comfortless 
153 



On Eating and Drinking. 

bed to the hour when they lounge back into it 
again, they never hve one moment of real life. 
Recreation, amusement, companionship, they 
know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, 
tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle 
words to them. From the day when their baby 
eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the 
day when, with an oath, they close them forever^ 
and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they 
never warm to one touch of human sympathy, 
never thrill to a single thought, never start to a 
single hope. In the name of the God of Mercy 
let them pour the maddening liquor down their 
throats, and feel for one brief moment that they 
live ! 

Ah ! we may talk sentiment as much as we like^. 
but the stomach is the real seat of happiness in 
this world. The kitchen is the chief temple 
wherein we worship, its roaring fire is our vestal 
flame, and the cook is our great high priest. He 
is a mighty magician and a kindly one. He 
soothes away all sorrow and care. He drives 
forth all enmity, gladdens all love. Our God is 
great, and the cook is his prophet. Let us eat, 
drink, and be merry. 



154 



On Furnished Apartments. 



ON FURNISHED APARTMENTS. 

*'/^H, you have some rooms to let." 
^ "Mother!" 

"Well, what is it?" 

" 'Ere's a gentleman about the rooms." 

"Ask 'im in. I'll be up in a minute." 

"Will yer step inside, sir? Mother'U be up 
in a minute. ' ' 

So you step inside, and, after a minute, " moth- 
er ' ' comes slowly up the kitchen stairs, untying 
her apron as she comes, and calling down instruc- 
tions to some one below about the potatoes. 

"Good-morning, sir," says " mother," with a 
washed-out smile ; ' ' will you step this way, 
please ? ' ' 

" Oh, it's hardly worth while my coming up," 
you say ; " what sort of rooms are they, and how- 
much ? " 

"Well," says the landlady, " if you'll step 
upstairs, I'll show them to you. ' ' 

So, with a protesting murmur, meant to imply 
that any waste of time complained of hereafter 
must not be laid to your charge, you follow 
"mother " upstairs. 

155 



On Furnished Apartments. 

At the first landing you run up against a pail 
and a broom, whereupon " mother " expatiates 
upon the unrehabiHty of servant-girls, and bawls 
over the balusters for Sarah to come and take 
them away at once. When you get outside the 
rooms, she pauses, with her hand upon the door, 
to explain to you that they are rather untidy just 
at present, as the last lodger left only yesterday j 
and she also adds that this is their cleaning day 
— it always is. With this understanding you 
enter, and both stand solemnly " feasting " their 
eyes upon the scene before them. The rooms 
can not be said to appear inviting. Even 
*' mother's" face betrays no admiration. Un- 
tenanted ''furnished apartments," viewed in the 
morning sunlight, do not inspire cheery sensa- 
tions. There is a lifeless air about them. It is a 
very different thing when you have settled down 
and are living in them. With your old familiar 
household gods to greet your gaze whenever you 
glance up, and all your little knicknacks spread 
'around you — with the photos of all the girls that 
you have loved and lost ranged upon the mantel- 
piece, and half a dozen disreputable-looking pipes 
■scattered about in painfully prominent positions 
^ — with one carpet slipper peeping from beneath 
156 



On Furnished Apartments. 

the coal-box, and the other perched on the top of 
the piano — with the well-known pictures to hide 
the dingy walls, and these dear old friends, your 
books, higgledy-piggledy all over the place — 
with the bits of old blue china that your mother 
prized, and the screen she worked in those far 
by-gone days, when the sweet old face was laugh- 
ing and young, and the white soft hair tumbled 
in gold-brown curls from under the coal-scuttle 
bonnet — 

Ah, old screen, what a gorgeous personage you 
must have been in your young days, when the 
tulips and roses and lilies (all growing from one 
stem) were fresh in their glistening sheen ! 
Many a summer and winter have come and gone 
since then, my friend, and you have played with 
the dancing fire-light, until you have grown sad 
and gra}'. Your brilliant colors are fast fading 
now, and the envious moths have gnawed your 
silken threads. You are withering away like the 
dead hands that wove you. Do you ever think 
of those dead hands ? You seem so grave and 
thoughtful, sometimes, that I almost think you 
do. Come, you and I and the deep-glowing 
embers, let us talk together. Tell me, in your 
silent language, what you remember of those 
157 



. On Furnished Apartments. 

young days, when you lay on my Httle mother's 
lap, and her girlish fingers played with your rain- 
bow tresses. Was there never a lad near, some- 
times — never a lad who would seize one of those 
little hands to smother it with kisses, and who 
would persist in holding it, thereby sadly inter- 
fering with the progress of your making ? Was 
not your frail existence often put in jeopardy by 
this same clumsy, headstrong lad, who would toss 
you disrespectfully aside that he — not satisfied 
with one — might hold both hands, and gaze up 
into the loved eyes ? I can see that lad now 
through the haze of the flickering twilight. He 
is an eager, bright-eyed boy, with pinching, 
dandy shoes, and tight-fitting smalls, snowy shirt- 
frill and stock, and — oh ! such curly hair. A 
wild, light-hearted boy! Can he be the great,, 
grave gentleman upon whose stick I used to ride 
cross-legged, the care-worn man into whose 
thoughtful face I used to gaze with childish rev- 
erence, and whom I used to call "father?" 
You say "Yes," old screen; but are you quite 
sure ? It is a serious charge you are bringing ; 
can it be possible ? Did he have to kneel down 
in those wonderful smalls, and pick you up, and 
rearrange you, before he was forgiven, and his 
158 



On Furnished. Apartments. 

curly head smoothed by my mother's Uttle hand ? 
Ah ! old screen, and did the lads and the lassies 
go making love fifty years ago just as they do- 
now ? Are men and women so unchanged ? Did 
Httle maidens' hearts beat the same under pearl- 
embroidered bodices as they do under Mother 
Hubbard cloaks ? Have steel casques and chim- 
ney-pot hats made no difference to the brains 
that work beneath them ? Oh, Time ! great 
Chronos ! and is this your power ? Have you 
dried up seas and leveled mountains, and left the 
tiny human heart-strings to defy you? Ah, yes ! 
they were spun by a Mightier Hand than thou, 
and they stretch beyond your narrow ken, for 
their ends are made fast in eternity. Ay, you 
may mow down the leaves and the blossoms, but 
the roots of life lie too deep for your sickle to 
sever. You refashion Nature's garments, but you 
can not vary by a jot the throbbings of her pulse. 
The world rolls round obedient to your laws, but 
the heart of man is not of your kingdom, for in 
its , birth-place "a. thousand years are but as 
yesterday. ' ' 

I am getting away, though, I fear, from my 
" furnished apartments," and I hardly know how 
to get back. But I have some excuse for my 
159 



On Furnished Apartments. 

^meanderings this time. It is a piece of old 
furniture that has led me astray, and fancies 
gather, somehow, round old furniture, like moss 
around old stones. One's chairs and tables get 
to be almost part of one's life, and to seem like 
'quiet friends. What strange tales the wooden- 
headed old fellows could tell, did they but choose 
to speak ! At what unsuspected comedies and 
tragedies have they not assisted ! What bitter 
tears have been sobbed into that old sofa cushion ! 
AVhat passionate whisperings the settee must have 
overheard ! 

New furniture has no charms for me, compared 
-with old. It is the old things that we love — the 
old faces, the old books, the old jokes. New 
furniture can make a palace, but it takes old fur- 
niture to make a home. Not merely old in itself 
— lodging-house furniture generally is that — but 
it must be old to us, old in associations and re- 
collections. The furniture of furnished apart- 
ments, however ancient it may be in reality, is 
new to our eyes, and we feel as though we could 
never get on with it. As, too, in the case of all 
fresh acquaintances, whether wooden or human 
(and there is very little difference between the 
two species sometimes), everything impresses you 
i6o 



On Furnished Apartments. 

with its worst aspect. The knobby wood-worlc 
and the shiny horse-hair covering of the easy- 
chair suggest anything but ease. The mirror is 
smoky. The curtains want washing. The carpet 
is frayed. The table looks as if it would go over 
the instant anything w^as rested on it. The grate 
is cheerless, the wall-paper hideous The ceil- 
ing appears to have had coffee spilled all over it,. 
and the ornaments — well, they are worse thaw 
the wall-paper. 

There must surely be some special and secret 
manufactory for the production of lodging-house 
ornaments. Precisely the same articles are to be 
found at every lodging-house all over the king- 
dom, and they are never seen anywhere else. 
There are the two — what do you call them? they 
stand one at each end of the mantel-piece, where 
they are never safe ; and they are hung round 
with long triangular slips of glass that clank 
against one another and make you nervous. In 
the commoner class of rooms, these works of art 
are supplemented by a couple of pieces of china 
which might each be meant to represent a cow 
sitting upon its hind legs, or a model of the 
Temple of Diana at Ephesus, or a dog, or any- 
thing else you like to fancy. Somewhere about 
II i6i 



On Furnished Apartments. 

the room you come across a bihous-looking ob- 
ject which, at first, you take to be a lump of 
•dough, left about by one of the children, but 
which, on scrutiny, seems to resemble an under- 
done Cupid. This thing the landlady calls a 
statue. Then there is a ''sampler," worked by 
some idiot related to the family, a picture of the 
Huguenots, two or three Scripture texts, and a 
highly framed and glazed certificate to the effect 
that the father has been vaccinated,, or is an Odd 
Fellow, or something of that sort. 

You examine these various attractions, and then 
dismally ask what the rent is. 

"That's rather a good deal," you say, on hear- 
ing the figure. 

'' Well, to tell you the truth," answers the 
landlady, with a sudden burst of candor, " I've 
always had" — (mentioning a sum a good deal 
in excess of the first-named amount), ''and 
before that I used to have ' ' — (a still higher 
figure) . 

What the rent of apartments must have been 
twenty years ago makes one shudder to think 
of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly 
ashamed of yourself by informing you, whenever 
the subject crops up, that she used to get twice as 
162 



On Furnished Apartments. 

much for her rooms as you are paying. Young 
men lodgers of the last generation must have 
been of a wealthier class than they are now, or 
they must have ruined themselves. I should 
have had to live in an attic. 

Curious, that in lodgings, the rule of life is 
reversed. The higher you get up in the world, 
the lower you come down in your lodgings. On 
the lodging-house ladder, the poor man is at the 
top, the rich man underneath. You start in at 
the attic, and work your way down to the first 
floor. 

A good many great men have lived in attics, 
and some have died there. Attics, says the dic- 
tionary, are ''places where lumber is stored," 
and the world has used them to store a good deal 
of its lumber in at one time or another. Its 
preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed 
men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men 
who will tell truths that no one wants to hear — 
these are the lumber that the world hides away 
in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic, and 
Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Gold- 
smith wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey 
knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully 
in them, sleeping soundly — too soundly some- 
163 



On Furnished Apartments. 

times — upon their truckle-beds, hke the sturdy- 
old soldier of fortune that he was, inured to 
hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens 
spent his youth among them, Morland his old age 
— alas ! a drunken, premature old age. Hans 
Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet 
fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, way- 
ward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their 
crazy tables ; priggish Benjamin Franklin ; Savage, 
the wrong-headed, much-troubled, when he could 
afford any softer bed than a doorstep ; young 
Bloomfield, '' Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watt the 
engineer — the roll is endless. Ever since the 
habitations of men were reared two stories high, 
has the garret been the nursery of genius. 

No one who honors the aristocracy of mind 
can feel ashamed of acquaintanceship with them. 
Their damp-stained walls are sacred to the memory 
of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world 
and all its arts — all the spoils that it has won from 
Nature, all the fire that it has snatched from 
heaven — were gathered together, and divided 
into heaps, and we could point and say, for in- 
stance : These mighty truths were flashed forth 
in the brilliant salon, amid the ripple of light 
laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes ; and This 
164 



On Furnished Apartments. 

deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study^ 
where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on 
the leather-scented shelves; and This heap be- 
longs to the crowded street ; and That to the 
daisied field — the heap that would tower up high 
above the rest, as a mountain above hills, would 
be the one at which we should look up and say : 
This noblest pile of all — these glorious paintings 
and this wondrous music, these trumpet words, 
these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they 
were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain 
in the sordid squalor of the city garret. There, 
from their eyries, while the world heaved and 
throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their 
eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the 
ages. There, where the sunlight, streaming 
through the broken panes, fell on rotting boards 
and crumbling walls ; there, from their lofty 
thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their 
thunder-bolts and shaken, before now, the earth 
to its foundations. 

Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, 
world ! Shut them fast in, and turn the key of 
poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and 
let them fret their hero lives away within the 
narrow cage. Leave them there to starve, and 
165 



On Furnished Apartments. 

rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of 
their hands against the door. Roll onward in 
your dust and noise, and pass them by, forgotten. 

But take care lest they turn and sting you. 
All do not, like the fabled phoenix, warble sweet 
melodies in their agony; sometimes they spit 
venom — venom you must breathe whether you 
will or not, for you cannot seal their mouths, 
though you may fetter their limbs. You can 
lock the door upon them, but they burst open 
their shaky lattices, and call out over the house- 
tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded 
wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue 
St. Jacques, and jeered at his angry shrieks. But 
the thin, piping tones swelled, a hundred years 
later, into the sullen roar of the French Revolu- 
tion, and civilization to this day is quivering to 
the reverberations of his voice. 

As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not 
to live in ; as residences they are inconvenient. 
There is too much getting up and down-stairs 
connected with them to please me. It puts one 
unpleasantly in mind of the tread-mill. The 
form of the ceiling offers too many facilities for 
bumping your head, and too few for shaving. 
And the note of the tom-cat, as he sings to his 
i66 



On Furnished Apartments. 

love in the stilly night, outside on the tiles, be- 
comes positively distasteful when heard so near. 

No, for living in, give me a suite of rooms on 
the fyrst floor of a Piccadilly mansion (I wish some- 
body would !); but, for thinking in, let me have 
an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest 
quarter of the city. I have all Herr Teufels- 
drockh's affection for attics. There is a sub- 
limity about loftiness. I love to '^sit at ease 
and look down upon the wasps' nests beneath; " 
to listen to the dull murmur of the human tide, 
ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the nar- 
row streets and lanes below. How small men 
seem, how like a swarm of ants sweltering in 
endless confusion on their tiny hill ! How petty 
seems the work on which they are hurrying and 
skurrying ! How childishly they jostle against 
one another, and turn to snarl and scratch I 
They jabber and screech and curse, but their 
puny voices do not reach up here. They fret, 
and fume, and rage, and pant, and die; " but I, 
mein Werther, sit above it all ; I am alone with 
the stars." 

The most extraordinary attic I ever came across 
was one a friend and I once shared, many years 
ago. Of all eccentrically planned things from 



On Furnished Apartments. 

Bradshaw to the maze at Hampton Court, that 
room was the eccentricalest. The architect who 
designed it must have been a genius, though I 
cannot help thinking that his talents would have 
been better employed in contriving puzzles than 
in shaping human habitations. No figure in 
Euclid could give any idea of that apartment. 
It contained seven corners, two of the walls sloped 
to a point, and the window was just over the fire- 
place. The only possible position for the bed- 
stead was between the door and the cupboard. 
To get anything out of the cupboard, we had 
to scramble over the bed, and a large percentage 
of the various commodities thus obtained were 
absorbed by the bed-clothes. Indeed, so many 
things were spilled and dropped upon the bed 
that, toward night-time, it had become a sort of 
small co-operative store. Coal was what it always 
had most in stock. We used to keep our coal in 
the bottom part of the cupboard, and, when any 
was wanted, we had to climb over the bed, fill a 
shovelful, and then crawl back. It was an excit- 
ing moment when we reached the middle of the 
bed. We would hold our breath, fix our eyes 
upon the shovel, and poise ourselves for the last 
move. The next instant we, and the coals, and 
i68 



On Furnished Apartments. 

the shovel, and the bed would be all mixed up 
together. 

I've heard of the people going into raptures 
over beds of coal. We slept in one every night, 
and were not in the least stuck up about it. 

But our attic, unique though it was, had by no 
means exhausted the architect's sense of humor. 
The arrangement of the whole house was a marvel 
of originality. All the doors opened outward, 
so that, if any one wanted to leave a room at the 
same moment that you were coming down-stairs 
it was unpleasant for you. There was no ground 
floor ; its ground floor belonged to a house in the 
next court, and the front door opened direct 
upon a flight of stairs leading down to the cellar. 
Visitors, on entering the house, would suddenly 
shoot past the person who had answered the door 
to them, and disappear down these stairs. Those 
of a nervous temperament used to imagine that it 
was a trap laid for them, and would shout murder, 
as they lay on their backs at the bottom, till 
somebody came and picked them up. 

It is a long time ago, now, that I last saw the 

inside of an attic. I have tried various floors 

since, but I have not found that they have made 

much difl'erence to me. Life tastes much the 

169 



On Dress and Deportment. 

same, whether we quaff it from a golden goblet or 
drink it out of a stone mug. The hours come 
laden with the same mixture of joy and sorrow, 
no matter where we wait for them. A waistcoat 
of broadcloth or of fustian is alike to an aching 
heart, and we laugh no merrier on velvet cushions 
than we did on wooden chairs. Often have I 
sighed in those low-ceilinged rooms, yet disap- 
pointments have come neither less nor lighter 
since I quitted them. Life works upon a com- 
pensating balance, and the happiness we gain in 
one direction we lose in another. As our means 
increase, so do our desires ; and we ever stand 
midway between the two. When we reside in an 
attic, we enjoy a supper of fried fish and stout. 
When we occupy the first floor, it takes an elabo- 
rate dinner at the Continental to give us the 
same amount of satisfaction. 



ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 

T^HEY say — people who ought to be ashamed 
-'' of themselves do — that the consciousness of 
being well dressed imparts a blissfulness to the 
human heart that religion is powerless to bestow. 
I am afraid these cynical persons are sometimes 
170 



On Dress and Deportment. 

correct. I know that when I was a very young 
man (many, many years ago, as the story-books 
say), and wanted cheering up, I used to go and 
dress myself in all my best clothes. If I had been 
annoyed in any manner — if my washer-woman 
had discharged me, for instance ; or my blank 
verse poem had been returned for the tenth time, 
with the editor's compliments, ''and regrets that 
owing to want of space he is unable to avail him- 
self of kind offer ; " or I had been snubbed by 
the woman I loved as man never loved before. 
By the way, it's really extraordinary what a 
variety of ways of loving there must be. We all 
do it as it was never done before. I don't know 
how our great-grandchildren will manage. They 
will have to do it on their heads by their time, if 
they persist in not clashing with any previous 
method. 

Well, as I was saying, when these unpleasant 
sort of things happened, and I felt crushed, I put 
on all my best clothes, and went out. I brought 
back my vanishing self-esteem. In a glossy new 
hat, and a pair of trousers with a fold down the 
front (carefully preserved by keeping them under 
the bed — I don't mean on the floor, you know, 
but between the bed and the mattress), I felt I 
171 



On Dress and Deportment. 

was somebody, and that there were other washer- 
women ; ay, and even other girls to love, and 
who would, perhaps, appreciate a clever, good- 
looking young fellow. I didn't care ; that was my 
reckless way. I would make love to other maid= 
ens ; I felt that in those clothes I could do it. 
They have a wonderful deal to do with court- 
ing, clothes have. It is half the battle. ^t all 
events, the young man thinks so, and it generally 
takes him a couple of hours to get himself up for 
the occasion. His first half hour is occupied in 
trying to decide whether to wear his light suit 
with a cane and drab billycock, or his black tails 
with a chimney-pot hat and his new umbrella. 
He is sure to be unfortunate in either decision. 
If he wears his light suit and takes the stick, it 
•comes on to rain, and he reaches the house in a 
damp and muddy condition, and spends the eve- 
ning trying to hide his boots. If, on the other 
hand, he decides in favor of the top hat and 
umbrella — nobody would ever dream of going 
•out in a top hat without an umbrella ; it would 
be like letting baby (bless it) toddle out without 
its nurse. How I do hate a top hat ! One lasts 
me a very long while, I can tell you. I only 
wear it when — well, never mind when I wear it. 
172 



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Idle Thoughts 



P- 174. 



COULD NOT HELP BEING FIERCE WITH A PLUME IN HIS BONNET, 
A DAGGER IN HIS BELT." 



On Dress and Deportment. 

It lasts me a very long while. I've had my pre- 
sent one five years. It was rather old-fashioned 
last summer, but the shape has come round again 
now, and I look quite stylish. 

But to return to our young man and his court- 
ing. If he starts off with the top hat and um- 
brella, the afternoon turns out fearfully hot, and 
the perspiration takes all the soap out of his mus- 
tache^ and converts the beautifully arranged curl 
over his forehead into a limp wisp, resembling a 
lump of sea- weed. The Fates are never favora- 
ble to the poor wretch. If he does by any chance 
reach the door in proper condition, she has gone 
out with her. cousin, and won't be back till late. 

How a young lover, made ridiculous by the 
gawkiness of modern costume, must envy the 
picturesque gallants of seventy years ago ! Look 
at them (on the Christmas cards), with their curly 
hair and natty hats, their well-shaped legs incased 
in smalls, their dainty Her.sian boots, their ruf- 
fling frills, their canes, and dangling seals. No 
wonder the little maiden in the big poke bonnet 
and the light blue sash casts down her eyes and is 
completely won. Men could win hearts in clothes 
like that. But what can you expect from baggy 
trousers and a monkey jacket ? 
173 



On Dress and Deportment. 

Clothes have more effect upon us than we 
imagine. Our deportment depends upon our 
dress. Make a man get into seedy, worn out 
rags, and he will skulk along with his head hang- 
ing down, like a man going out to fetch his own 
supper-beer. But deck out the same article in 
gorgeous raiment and fine linen, and he will strut 
down the main thoroughfare, swinging his cane, 
and looking at the girls, as perky as a bantam 
cock. 

Clothes alter our very nature. A man could 
not help being fierce and daring with a plume in 
his bonnet, a dagger in his belt, and a lot of 
puffy white things all down his sleeves. But in 
an ulster, he wants to get behind a lamp-post and 
call police. 

I am quite ready to admit that you can find 
sterling merit, honest worth, deep affection, and 
all such like virtues of the roast-beef and plum- 
pudding school, as much, and perhaps more, 
.under broadcloth and tweed as ever existed 
beneath silk and velvet ; but the spirit of that 
knightly chivalry, that ''rode atilt for lady's 
love," and '/fought for lady's smiles," needs 
the clatter of steel and the rustje of plumes to 
summon it from its grave between the dusty folds 
174 



On Dress and Deportment. 

of tapestry and underneath the musty leaves of 
moldering chronicles. 

The world must be getting old, I think ; it 
dresses so very soberly now. We have been 
through the infant period of humanity, when we 
used to run about with nothing on but a. long, 
loose robe, and liked to have our feet bare. And 
then came the rough, barbaric age, the boyhood 
of our race. We didn't care what we wore 
then, but thought it nice to tattoo ourselves all 
over, and we never did our hair. And, after 
that, the world grew into a young man, and be- 
came foppish. It decked itself in flowing 
curls and scarlet doublets, and went courting, 
and bragging, and bouncing — making a brave 
show. 

But all those merry, foolish days of youth are 
gone, and we are very sober, very solemn, and 
very stupid, some say — now. The world is a 
grave, middle aged gentleman in this nineteenth 
century, and would be shocked to see itself with 
a bit of finery on. So it dresses in black coats 
and trousers, and black hats, and black boots, 
and, dear me, it is such a very respectable gentle- 
man — to think it could ever have gone gadding 
about as a troubadour or a knight-errant, dressed 
175 



On Dress and Deportment. 

in all those fancy colors ! Ah, well ! we are more 
sensible in this age. 

Or, at least, we think ourselves so. It is a 
general theory nowadays that sense and dullness 
go together. 

Goodness is another quality that always goes 
with blackness. Very good people, indeed, you 
will notice, dress altogether in black, even to 
gloves and neck-ties, and they will probably take 
to black shirts before long. Medium goods 
indulge in light trousers on week days and some 
of them even go so far as to wear fancy waist- 
coats. On the other hand, people who care 
nothing for a future state go about in light suits ; 
and there have been known wretches so aban- 
doned as to wear a white hat. Such people, 
however, are never spoken of in genteel society, 
and perhaps I ought not to have referred to them 
here. 

By the way, talking of light suits, have you 
ever noticed how people stare at you the first time 
you go out in a new light suit ? They do not 
notice it so much afterward. The population of 
London have got accustomed to it by the third 
time you wear it. I say ''you," because I am 
not speaking from my own experience. I do not 
176 



On Dress and Deportment. 

wear such things at all myself. As I said, only 
sinful people do so. 

I wish, though, it were not so, and that one 
could be good, and respectable, and sensible 
without making one's self a guy. I look in the 
glass sometimes at my two long cylindrical bags 
(so picturesquely rugged about the knees), my 
stand-up collar, and billycock hat, and wonder 
what right I have to go about making God's world 
hideous. Then wild and wicked thoughts come 
into my heart. I don't want to be good and 
respectable. (I never can be sensible, I'm told, 
so that don't matter.) I want to put on laven- 
der-colored tights, with red velvet breeches and a 
green doublet, slashed with yellow; to have a 
light-blue silk cloak on my shoulder, and a black 
eagle's plume waving from my hat, and a big 
sword, and a falcon, and a lance, and a prancing 
horse, so that I might go about and gladden the 
eyes of the people. Why should we all try to 
look like ants, crawling over a dust-heap ? Why 
shouldn't we dress a little gayly ? I am sure, if 
we did, we should be happier. True, it is a 
little thing, but we are a little race, and what 
is the use of our pretending otherwise, and 
spoiling fun? Let philosophers get themselves 
12 177 



On Dress and Deportment. 

up like old crows if they like ; but let me be a 
butterfly. 

Women, at all events, ought to dress prettily. 
It is their duty. They are the flowers of the 
earth, and were meant to show, it up. We abuse 
them a good deal, we men ; but, goodness knows, 
the old world would be dull enough without their 
dresses and fair faces. How they brighten up 
every place they come into ! What a sunny 
commotion they — relations, of course — make in 
our dingy bachelor chambers ! and what a delight- 
ful litter their ribbons and laces, and gloves and 
hats, and parasols and kerchiefs make ! It is as 
if a wandering rainbow had dropped in to pay 
us a visit. 

It is one of the chief charms of the summer, 
to my mind, the way our little maids come out in 
pretty colors. I like to see the pink and blue 
and white glancing between the trees, dotting the 
green fields, and flashing back the sunlight. You 
can see the bright colors such a long way off. 
There are four white dresses climbing a hill in 
front of my window now. I can see them dis- 
tinctly, though it is three miles away. I thought, 
at first, they were mile-stones out for a lark. It's 
so nice to be able to see the darlings a long way 
178 



On Dress and Deportment. 

off — especially if they happen to be your wife and 
your mother-in-law. 

Talking of fields and mile-stones, reminds me 
that I want to say, in all seriousness, a few words 
about women's boots. 

The women of these islands all wear boots 
too big for them. They can never get a boot to 
fit. The boot-makers do not keep sizes small 
enough. 

Over and over again have I known women sit 
down on the top rail of a stile, and declare they 
could not go a step further because their boots 
hurt them so ; and it has always been the same 
complaint — too big. 

It is time this state of things was altered. In 
the name of the husbands and fathers of Eng- 
land, I call upon the boot-makers to reform. Our 
wives, our daughters, and our cousins are not to 
be lamed and tortured with impunity. Why can 
not " narrow twos " be kept more in stock ? That 
is the size I find most women take. 

The waistband is another item of feminine 
apparel that is always too big. The dressmakers 
make these things so loose that the hooks and 
eyes by which they are fastened burst off, every 
now and then, with a report like thunder. 
179 



On Dress and Deportment. 

Why women suffer these wrongs — why they do 
not insist in having their clothes made small 
enough for them, I can not conceive. It can 
hardly be that they are disinclined to trouble 
themselves about matters of mere dress, for dress 
is the one subject that they really do think about; 
It is the only topic they ever get thoroughly 
interested in, and they talk about it all day long. 
If you see two women together, you may bet your 
bottom dollar they are discussing their own or 
their friend's clothes. You notice a couple of 
child-like beings, conversing by a window, and 
you wonder what sweet, helpful words are falling 
from their sainted lips. So you move nearer, and 
then you hear one say : 

"So I took in the waistband, and let out a 
seam, and it fits beautifully now." 

"Well," says the other, "I shall wear my 
plum-colored body to the Jones's, with a yellow 
plastron ; and they've got some lovely gloves at 
Puttick's only one and elevenpence." 

I went for a drive through a part of Derbyshire 
once, with a couple of ladies. It was a beautiful 
bit of country, and they enjoyed themselves im- 
mensely. They talked dressmaking the whole 
time. 

i8o 



On Dress and Deportment. 

*' Pretty view, that," I would say, waving my 
umbrella round. " Look at those blue, distant 
hills ! That little white speck, nestling in the 
woods, is Chatsworth, and over there — ' ' 

''Yes, very pretty indeed," one would reply. 
" Well, why not get a yard of sarsenet? " 

"What, and leave the skirt exactly as it is? " 

" Certainly. What place d'ye call this? " 

Then I would draw their attention to the fresh 
beauties that kept sweeping into view, and they 
would glance round, and say ''Charming!" 
'' Sweetly pretty ! " and immediately go off into 
raptures over each other's pocket-handkerchiefs, 
and mourn with each other over the decadence 
of cambric frilling. 

I believe if two women were cast together upon 
a desert island they would spend each day argu- 
ing the respective merits of sea-shells and birds' 
eggs, considered as trimmings, and would have 
a new fashion in fig leaves every month. 

Very young men think a good deal about 
clothes, but they don't talk about them to each 
other. They would not find much encourage- 
ment. A fop is not a favorite with his own sex. 
Indeed he gets a good deal more abuse from 
them than is necessary. His is a harmless failing, 
i8i 



On Dress and Deportment. 

and it soon wears out. Besides, a man who has 
no foppery at twenty will be a slatternly, dirty- 
collar, unbrushed-coat man at forty. A little 
foppishness in a young man is good ; it is human. 
I like to see a young cock ruffle his feathers, 
stretch his neck, and crow as if the whole world 
belonged to him. I don't like a modest, retiriijg 
man. Nobody does — not really, however much 
they may prate about modest worth, and other 
things they do not understand. 

A meek deportment is a great mistake in the 
world. Uriah Heep's father was a very poor 
judge of human nature, or he would not have 
told his son, as he did, that people liked humble- 
ness. There is nothing annoys them more, as a 
rule. Rows are half the fun of life, and you 
can't have rows with humble, meek-answering 
individuals. They turn away our wrath, and that 
is just what we do not want. We want to let it 
out. We have worked ourselves up into a state 
of exhilarating fury, and then just as we are an- 
ticipating the enjoyment of a vigorous set-to, 
they spoil all our plans with their exasperating 
humility. 

Xantippe's life must have been one long misery, 
tied to that calmly irritating man, Socrates. 
182 



On Dress and Deportment. 

Fancy a married woman doomed to live on from 
day to day without one single quarrel with her 
husband. A man ought to humor his wife in 
these things. Heaven knows their lives are dull 
enough, poor girls ! They have none of the en- 
joyments we have. They go to no political 
meetings ; they may not even belong to the local 
amateur parliament; they are excluded from 
smoking carriages on the Metropolitan Railway, 
and they never see a comic paper — or, if they do, 
they do not know it is comic; nobody tells them. 

Surely, with existence such a dreary blank for 
them as this, we might provide a little row for 
their amusement now and then, even if we do 
not feel inclined for it ourselves. A really sensi- 
ble man does so, and is loved accordingly, for it 
is little acts of kindness such as this that go 
straight to a woman's heart. It is such like 
proofs of loving self-sacrifice that make her tell 
her female friends what a good husband he was — 
after he is dead. 

Yes, poor Xantippe must have had a hard time 
of it. The bucket episode was particularly sad 
for her. Poor woman ! she did think she would 
rouse him up a bit with that. She had taken the 
trouble to fill the bucket, perhaps been a long 
183 



On Dress and Deportment. 

way to get specially dirty water. And she waited 
for him. And then to be met in such a way, 
after all ! Most likely she sat down, and had a 
good cry afterward. It must have seemed all so 
hopeless to the poor child ; and, for all we know, 
she had no mother to whom she could go and 
abuse him. 

What was it to her that her husband was a great 
philosopher? Great philosophy don't count in 
married life. 

There was a very good little boy once who 
wanted to go to sea. And the captain asked him 
what he could do. He said he could do the 
multiplication table backward, and paste sea-weed 
in a book; that he knew how many times the 
word *' begat" occurred in the Old Testament; 
and could recite " The Boy Stood on the Burn- 
ing Deck," and Wordsworth's '' We Are Seven." 

''Werrygood — werry good indeed," said the 
man of the sea, '^ and ken yer kerry coals? " 

It is just the same when you want to marry. 
Great ability is not required so much as a little 
usefulness. Brains are at a discount in the mar- 
ried state. There is no demand for them, no 
appreciation even. Our wives sum us up accord- 
ing to a standard of their own, in which brilliancy 
184 



On Memory. 

of intellect obtains no marks. Your lady and 
mistress is not at all impressed by your cleverness 
and talent, my dear reader — not in the slightest. 
Give her a man who can do an errand neatly, 
without attempting to use his own judgment over 
it, or any damned nonsense of that kind; and 
who can be trusted to hold a child the right way 
up, and not make himself objectionable when- 
ever there is lukewarm mutton for dinner. That 
is the sort of a husband a sensible woman likes , 
not one of your scientific or literary nuisances, 
who go upsetting the whole house and putting 
everybody out with their foolishness. 

ON MEMORY. 

*« I remember, I remember, 
In the days of chill November, 
How the blackbird on the — " 

I FORGET the rest. It is the beginning of the 
first piece of poetry I ever learned ; for 
" Hey, diddle diddle, 
The cat and the fiddle," 

I take no note of, it being of a frivolous char- 
acter, and lacking in the qualities of true poetry. 
I collected fourpence by the recital of " I re- 
185 



On Memory. 

member, I remember. ' ' I knew it was fourpence 
because they told me that if I kept it until I got 
twopence more I should have sixpence, which 
argument, albeit undeniable, moved me not, and 
the money was squandered, to the best of my 
•recollection, on the very next morning, although 
upon what memory is a blank. 

That is just the way with Memory; nothing 
that she brings to us is complete. She is a will- 
ful child ; all her toys are broken. I remember 
tumbling into a huge dust-hole, when a very 
small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection 
of ever getting out again ; and, if memory were 
all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to 
believe I was there still. At another time — some 
years later — I was assisting at an exceedingly in- 
teresting love scene ; but the only thing about it 
I can call to mind distinctly is that, at the most 
critical moment, somebody suddenly opened the 
door and said: ''Emily, you're wanted," in a 
sepulchral tone, that gave one the idea the police 
had come for her. All the tender words she said 
to me, and all the beautiful things I said to her, 
are utterly forgotten. 

Life, altogether, is but a crumbling ruin, when 
we turn to look behind ; a shattered column here^ 
1 86 



On Memory. 

where a massive portal stood ; the broken shaft 
of a window to mark my lady's bower; and a 
moldering heap of blackened stones where the 
glowing flames once leaped, and, over all, the 
tinted lichen and the ivy clinging green. 

For everything looms pleasant through the 
softening haze of time. Even the sadness that is 
past seems sweet. Our boyish days look very 
merry to us now, all nutting, hoop, and ginger- 
bread. The snubbings and toothaches and the 
Latin verbs are all forgotten — the Latin verbs 
especially. And we fancy we were very happy 
when we were hobbledehoys, and loved ; and we 
wish that we could love again. We never think 
of the heartaches, or the sleepless nights, or the 
hot dryness of our throats, when she said she 
could never be anything to us but a sister — as if 
any man wanted more sisters ! 

Yes, it is the brightness, not the darkness, that 
we see when we look back. The sunshine casts 
no shadows on the past. The road that we have 
traversed stretches very fair behind us. We see 
not the sharp stones. We dwell but on the roses 
by the way-side, and the strong briers that stung 
us are, to our distant eyes, but gentle tendrils 
waving in the wind. God be thanked that it is. 
187 



On Memory. 

so — that the ever-lengthening chain of memory 
has only pleasant links, and that the bitterness 
and sorrow of to-day are smiled at on the mor- 
row. 

It seems as though the brightest side of every- 
thing were also its highest and best, so that, as our 
little lives sink back behind us into the dark sea of 
forgetfulness, all that which is the lightest and 
the most gladsome is the last to sink, and stands 
above the waters, long in sight, when the angry 
thoughts and smarting pain are buried deep 
below the waves and trouble us no more. 

It is this glamour of the past, I suppose, that 
makes old folks talk so much nonsense about the 
days when they were young. The world appears 
to have been a very superior sort of place then, 
and things were more like what they ought to be. 
Boys were boys then, and girls were very differ- 
ent. Also, winters were something like winters, 
and summers not at all the wretched things we 
get put off with nowadays. As for the wonderful 
deeds people did in those times, and the extra- 
ordinary events that happened, it takes three 
strong men to believe half of them. 

I like to hear one of the old boys telling all 
about it to a party of youngsters who he knows 
i88 



On Memory. 

can not contradict him. It is odd if, after 
a while, he doesn't swear that the moon shone 
every night when he was a boy, and that tossing 
mad bulls in a blanket was a favorite sport at his 
school ! 

It always has been, and always will be, the 
same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young 
days sung a song bearing exactly the same bur- 
den ; and the young folk of to-day will drone 
out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation 
of the next generation. " Oh, give me back the 
good old days of fifty years ago," has been the 
cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take 
up the literature of 1835, and you will find the 
poets and novelists asking for the same impossi- 
ble gift as did the German minnesingers long 
before them, and the old Norse saga writers long 
before that. And for the same thing sighed the 
early prophets and the philosophers of ancient 
Greece. From all accounts, the world has been 
getting worse and worse ever since it was created. 
All I can say is that it must have been a remarka- 
bly delightful place when it was first opened to 
the public, for it is very pleasant even now, if 
you only keep as much as possible in the sun- 
shine, and take the rain good-temperedly. 
189 



On Memory. 

Yet there is no gainsaying but what it must 
have been somewhat sweeter in that dewy morn- 
ing of creation, when it was young and fresh, 
when the feet of the tramping milHons had not 
trodden its grass to dust, nor the din of the 
myriad cities chased the silence forever away. 
Life must have been noble and solemn to those 
free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human 
race, walking hand in hand with God under the 
great sky. They lived in sun-kissed tents amid 
the lowing herds. They took their simple wants 
from the loving hand of Nature, They toiled 
and talked and thought; and the great earth 
rolled around in stillness, not yet laden with 
trouble and wrong. 

Those days are past now. The quiet childhood 
of Humanity, spent in the far-off forest glades, 
and by the murmuring rivers, is gone forever; 
and human life is deepening down to manhood 
amid tumult, doubt, and hope. Its age of rest- 
ful peace is past. It has its work to finish, and 
must hasten on. What that work may be — what 
this world's share is in the great Design — we 
know not, though our unconscious hands are 
helping to accomplish it. Like the tiny coral 
insect, working deep under the dark waters, we 
190 



On Memory. 

strive and struggle, each for our own little ends, 
nor dream of the vast fabric we are building up 
for God. 

Let us have done with vain regrets and long- 
ings for the days that never will be ours again. 
Our work lies in front, not behind us ; and 
'' Forward ! " is our motto. Let us not sit with 
folded hands, gazing upon the past as if it were 
the building ; it is but the foundation. Let us 
not waste heart and life, thinking of what might 
have been, and forgetting the may be that lies 
before us. Opportunities flit by while we sit 
regretting the chances we have lost, and the hap- 
piness that comes to us we heed not, because of 
the happiness that is gone. 

Years ago, when I used to wander of an even- 
ing from the fireside to the pleasant land of fairy 
tales, I met a doughty knight and true. Many 
dangers had he overcome, in many lands had 
been ; and all men knew him for a brave and 
well-tried knight, and one that knew not fear, 
except, may be, upon such seasons when even a 
brave man might feel afraid, and yet not be 
ashamed. Now, as this knight, one day, was 
pricking wearily along a toilsome road, his heart 
misgave him, and was sore within him, because 
191 



On Memory. 

of the trouble of the way. Rocks, dark and of a 
monstrous size, hung high above his head, and 
like enough it seemed unto the knight that they 
should fall, and he lie low beneath them. 
Chasms there were on either side, and darksome 
caves, wherein fierce robbers lived, and dragons, 
very terrible, whose jaws dripped blood. And 
upon the road there hung a darkness as of night. 
So it came over that good knight that he would 
no more press forward, but seek another road, 
less grievously beset with difficulty unto his gen- 
tle steed. But, when in haste he turned and 
looked behind, much marveled our brave knight, 
for, lo ! of all the way that he had ridden, there 
was naught for eye to see; but, at his horse's 
heels there yawned a mighty gulf, whereof no 
man might ever spy the bottom, so deep was that 
same gulf. Then, when Sir Ghelent saw that of 
going back there was none, he prayed to good St. 
Cuthbert, and, setting spurs into his steed, rode 
forward bravely and most joyously. And naught 
harmed him. 

There is no returning on the road of life. The 

frail bridge of Time, on which we tread, sinks 

back into eternity at every step we take. The 

past is gone from us forever. It is gathered in 

192 



On Memory. 

and garnered. It belongs to us no more. No 
single word can ever be unspoken ; no single step 
retraced. Therefore, it beseems us, as true 
knights, to prick on bravely, nqt idly weep be- 
cause we can not now recall. 

A new life begins for us with every second. 
Let us go forward joyously to meet it. We must 
press on, whether we will or no, and we shall 
walk better with our eyes before us than with 
them ever cast behind. 

A friend came to me the other day, and urged 
me very eloquently to learn some wonderful sys- 
tem by which you never forgot anything. I 
don't know why he was so eager on the subject, 
unless it be that I occasionally borrow an um- 
brella, and have a knack of coming out, in the 
middle of a game of whist, with a mild : " Lor' ! 
I've been thinking all along that clubs were 
trumps." I declined the suggestion, however, 
in spite of the advantages he so attractively set 
forth. I have no wish to remember everything. 
There are many things in most men*s lives that 
had better be forgotten. There is that time, 
many years ago, when we did not act quite as 
honorably, quite as uprightly, as we, perhaps, 
should have done — that unfortunate deviation 
13 193 



On Memory. 

from the path of strict probity we once com- 
mitted, and in which, more unfortunate still, we 
were found out — that act of folly, of meanness, 
of wrong. Ah, well ! we paid the penalty, suf- 
fered the maddening hours of vain remorse, the 
hot agony of shame, the scorn, perhaps, of those 
we loved. Let us forget. Oh, Father Time, lift 
with your kindly hands those bitter memories 
from off our overburdened hearts, for griefs are 
ever coming to us with the coming hours, and our 
little strength is only as the day. 

Not that the past should be buried. The music 
of life would be mute if the chords of memory 
were snapped asunder. It is but the poisonous 
weeds, not the flowers, that we should root out 
from the garden of Mnemosyne. Do you remem- 
ber Dickens's '' Haunted Man," how he prayed 
for forgetfulness, and how, when his prayer was 
answered, he prayed for memory once more ? 
We do not want all the ghosts laid. It is only 
the haggard, cruel-eyed spectres that we flee from. 
Let the gentle, kindly phantoms haunt us as they 
will ; we are not afraid of them. 

Ah, me ! the world grows very full of ghosts 
as we grow older. We need not seek in dismal 
church-yards nor sleep in moated granges, to see 
194 



■^ On Memory. 

their shadowy faces, and hear the rustling of their 
garments in the night. Every house, every room, 
every creaking chair has its own particular ghost. 
They haunt the empty chambers of our lives, they 
throng around us like dead leaves whirled in the 
autumn wind. Some are living, some are dead. 
We know not. We clasped their hands once, 
loved them, quarreled with them, laughed with 
them, told them our thoughts and hopes and 
aims, as they told us theirs, till it seemed our 
very hearts had joined in a grip that would defy 
the puny power of Death. They are gone now ; 
lost to us forever. Their eyes will never look 
into ours again, and their voices we shall never 
hear. Only their ghosts come to us, and talk 
with us. We see them, dim and shadowy, through 
our tears. We stretch our yearning hands to 
t»hem, but they are air. 

Ghosts ! They are with us night and day. 
They walk beside us in the busy street, under the 
glare of the sun. They sit by us in the twilight 
at home. We see their little faces looking from 
the windows of the old school-house. We meet 
them in the woods and lanes, where we shouted 
and played as boys. Hark ! can not you hear 
their low laughter from behind the blackberry 
195 



On Memory. 

bushes, and their distant whoops along the grassy 
glades ? Down here, through the quiet fields, 
and by the wood, where the evening shadows are 
lurking, winds the path where we used to watch 
for her at sunset. Look, she is there now, in the 
dainty white frock we knew so well, with the big 
bonnet dangling from her little hands, and the 
sunny brown hair all tangled. Five thousand 
miles away ! Dead, for all we know ! What of 
that? She is beside us now, and we can look 
into her laughing eyes, and hear her voice. She 
will vanish at the stile by the wood, and we shall 
be alone ; and the shadows will creep out across 
the fields, and the night-wind will sweep past^ 
moaning. Ghosts ! they are always with us, and 
always will be, while the sad old world keeps 
echoing to the sob of long good-byes, while the 
cruel ships sail away across the great seas, and the 
cold, green earth lies heavy on the hearts of those 
we loved. 

But, oh, ghosts, the world would be sadder still 
without you. Come to us, and speak to us, oh, 
you ghosts of our old loves! Ghosts of play- 
mates, and of sweethearts, and old friends, of all 
you laughing boys and girls, oh, come to us, and 
be with us, for the world is very 'lonely, and new 
196 



On Memory. 

friends and faces are not like the old, and we can 
not love them, nay, nor laugh with them as we 
have loved and laughed with you. And when we 
walked together, oh, ghosts of our youth, the 
world was very gay and bright ; but now it has 
grown old, and we are growing weary ; and only 
you can bring the brightness and the freshness 
back to us. 

Memory is a rare ghost-raiser. Like a haunted 
house, its walls are ever echoing to unseen feet. 
Through the broken casements we watch the flit- 
ting shadows of the dead, and the saddest sha- 
dows of them all are the shadows of our own 
dead selves. 

Oh, those young, bright faces, so full of truth 
and honor, of pure, good thoughts, of noble long- 
ings, how reproachfully they look upon us, with 
their deep, clear eyes ! 

I fear they have good cause for their sorrow, 
poor lads. Lies and cunning and disbelief have 
crept into our hearts since those pre-shaving days 
= — and we meant to be so great and good. 

It is well we cannot see into the future. There 
are few boys of fourteen who would not feel 
ashamed of themselves at forty. 

I like to sit and have a talk sometimes with 
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On Memory. 

that odd little chap that was myself long ago. I 
think he likes it too, for he comes so often of an 
evening when I am alone with my pipe, listening 
to the whispering of the flames. I see his solemn 
little face looking at me through the scented 
smoke as it floats upAvard, and I smile at him ; 
and he smiles back at me, but his is such a grave, 
old-fashioned smile ! We chat about old times; 
and now and then he takes me by the hand, and 
then we slip through the black bars of the grate 
and down the dusky, glowing caves, to the land 
that lies behind the iire-light. There we find the 
days that used to be, and we wander along them 
together. He tells me as we walk all he thinks 
and feels. I laugh at him now and then, but the 
next moment I wish I had not, for he looks so 
grave I am ashamed of being frivolous. Besides, 
it is not showing proper respect to one so much 
older than myself — to one who was myself so very 
long before I became myself. 

We don't talk much at first, but look at one 
another: I down at his curly hair and little blue 
brow, he up sideways at me as he trots. And, 
somehow, I fancy the shy, round eyes do not 
altogether approve of me, and he heaves a little 
sigh, as though he were disappointed. But, after 
198 



On Memory. 

awhile, his bashfulness wears off, and he begins 
to chat. He tells me his favorite fairy tales, he 
can do up to six times, and he has a guinea-pig, 
and pa says fairy tales ain't true ; and isn't it a 
pity, 'cos he would so like to be a knight and 
fight a dragon and marry a beautiful princess. 
But he takes a more practical view of life when 
he reaches seven, and would prefer to grow up, 
be a bargee, and earn a lot of money. May be 
this is the consequence of falling in love, which 
he does about this time, with the young lady at 
the milk-shop cet. six. (God bless her little ever- 
dancing feet, whatever size they may be now!) 
He must be very fond of her, for he gives her 
one day his chiefest treasure — to wit, a huge 
pocket-knife with four rusty blades and a cork- 
screw, which latter has a knack of working itself 
out in some mysterious manner, and sticking into 
its owner's leg. She is an affectionate little 
thing, and she throws her arms round his neck 
and kisses him for it, then and there, outside the 
shop. But the stupid world, in the person of the 
boy at the cigar emporium next door, jeers at 
such tokens of love. Whereupon my young 
friend very properly prepares to punch the head 
of the boy at the cigar emporium next door; but 
199 



On Memory. 

fails in the attempt, the boy at the cigar empor- 
ium next door punching his instead. 

And then comes school life with its bitter little 
sorrows and its joyous shoutings, its jolly larks, 
and its hot tears falling on beastly Latin gram- 
mars and silly old copy-books. It is at school 
that he injures himself for life — as I firmly be- 
lieve — trying to pronounce German; and it is 
there, too, that he learns of the importance 
attached by the French nation to pens, ink, and 
paper. "Have you pens, ink, and paper?" is 
the first question asked by one Frenchman of 
another on their meeting. The other fellow has 
not any of them, as a rule, but says that the uncle 
of his brother has got them all three. The first 
fellow doesn't appear to care a hang about the 
uncle of the other fellow's brother ; what he 
wants to know now is, has the neighbor of the 
other fellow's mother got 'em ? " The neighbor 
of my mother has no pens, no ink, and no 
paper," replies the other man, beginning to get 
wild. " Has the child of thy female gardener 
some pens, some ink, or some paper ?' ' He has 
him there. After worrying enough about these 
wretched inks, pens, and papers to make every- 
body miserable, it turns out that the child of his 



On Memory. 

own female gardener hasn't any. Such a dis- 
covery would shut up any one but a French exer- 
cise man. It has no effect at all, though, on this 
shameless creature. He never thinks of apologiz- 
ing, but says his aunt had some mustard. 

So, in the acquisition of more or less useless 
knowledge, soon happily to be forgotten, boy- 
hood passes away. The red-brick school-house 
fades from view, and we turn down into the 
world's high-road. My little friend is no longer 
little now. The short jacket has sprouted tails. 
The battered cap, so useful as a combination of 
pocket-handkerchief, drinking-cup, and weapon 
of attack, has grown high and glossy; and in- 
stead of a slate-pencil in his mouth there is a 
cigarette, the smoke of which troubles him, for 
it will get up his nose. He tries a cigar a little 
later on, as being more stylish — a big, black 
Havana. It doesn't seem altogether to agree with 
him, for I find him sitting over a bucket in the 
back kitchen afterward, solemnly swearing never 
to smoke again. 

And now his mustache begins to be almost vis- 
ible to the naked eye, Avhereupon he immediately 
takes to brandy and soda, and fancies himself a 
man. He talks about ''two to one against the 



On Memory. 

favorite," refers to actresses as ''Little Emmy," 
and "Kate," and ''Baby," and murmurs about 
his " losses at cards the other night," in a style 
implying that thousands have been squandered, 
though, to do him justice, the actual amount is 
most probably one and twopence. Also, if I see 
aright — for it is always twilight in this land of 
memories — he sticks an eyeglass in his eye and 
stumbles at everything. 

His female relations, much troubled at these 
things, pray for him (bless their gentle hearts !), 
and see visions of Old Bailey trials and halters as 
the only possible outcome of such reckless dissi- 
pation ; and the prediction of his first school- 
master, that he would come to a bad end, assumes 
the proportions of inspired prophecy- 
He has a lordly contempt at this age for the 
other sex, a blatantly good opinion of himself, 
and a sociably patronizing manner toward all th^ 
elderly male friends of the family. Altogether, 
it must be confessed, he is somewhat of a nuisance 
about this time. 

It does not last long, though. He falls in love 
in a little while, and that soon takes the bounce 
out of him. I notice his boots are much too 
small for him now, and his hair is fearfully and 



On Memory. 

wonderfully arranged. He reads poetry more 
than he used to, and he keeps a rhyming dictionary 
in his bedroom. Every morning, on the floor, 
Emily Jane finds scraps of torn-up paper, and 
reads thereon of ''cruel hearts and love's deep 
darts," of "beauteous eyes and lover's sighs," 
and much more of the old, old song that lads so 
love to sing, and lassies love to listen to while 
giving their dainty heads a toss, and pretending 
never to hear. 

The course of love, however, seems not to have 
run smoothly, for, later on, he takes more walk- 
ing exercise and less sleep, poor boy, than is good 
for him ; and his face is suggestive of anything 
but wedding- bells and happiness ever after. 

And here he seems to vanish. The little, 
boyish self that has grown up beside me as we 
walked, is gone. 

I am alone, and the road is very dark. I stum- 
ble on, I know not how nor care, for the way 
seems leading nowhere, and there is no light to 
guide. 

But at last the morning comes, and I find that 
I have grown into myself. 

THE END. 

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